Overcompression
Music sucks today.
Not the bands -- theres lots of great stuff out there, its just much harder to given the death of radio.
No, we are talking about the quality of recorded music. Its bad, and getting worse. And, we have proof of exactly how bad it sucks: Overcompression
As reported by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), recored music has increasingly grown louder, at the expense of dynamic range -- the differences between the softest and loudest portions of any recorded music sample.
IEEE reports on "the smoking gun of the loudness war is the difference between the waveforms of songs 20 years ago and now." Below you can see two examples:
A waveform from the late 80s / early 90s:
A waveform from now:
For those people interested in this sort of thing, there is a full article on this: The Future of Music. See also The CD Turns 25).
UPDATE: December 28, 2007 9:27 AM
See this new article:
The Death of High Fidelity
In the age of MP3s, sound quality is worse than ever
ROBERT LEVINE
Rolling Stone, Dec 26, 2007 1:27 PM
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17777619/the_death_of_high_fidelity
>
Source:
The Future of Music
Suhas Sreedhar
August 2007
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aug07/5429
Wednesday, August 29, 2007 | 09:00 PM | Permalink
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Comments
Compression is also apparently why TV commercials appear louder than the show you were watching
That is, assuming anybody watches commercial TV anymore. Loud commercials are the one thing I don't miss. I get compensated for the loss by talk radio though
Posted by: DavidB | Aug 29, 2007 9:13:28 PM
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