Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems Support the move to bring back dynamic range to music!

Dear Nick,

Not freeware but good is Sony's Sound Forge

Regards

I've taken the liberty of posting the link on the B&W Surround sound debate as well

I've signed up, the video is very convincing, sounds like a regular MP3 iPod.

I have signed up at the Turn Me Up website, but haven't yet had the chance to watch the video.

The issue of hot mastering and loss of dynamic range has been a concern of mine ever since the 2002 release of Rush's Vapor Trails CD (my all time favorite band).

As released, this CD sounds horrible due to being mastered at way too hot of a level, to the point that a significant amount of the peaks are actually clipped in the digital samples. My disappointment with the sound led me to purchasing Cool Edit (now Adobe Audition) and some other processing tools to try and restore some semblance of decency to the sound.

While not perfect, my efforts allowed me to enjoy listening to the CD without being overly distracted by the poor sound due to the mastering.

Here are some before and after examples of waveforms from the 3rd track, Ghost Rider. Larger images can be found on my photo website:

Ghost Rider Audio Repair Example

Entire Song, Original:



Entire Song, Post-Processed:




Zoomed region, Original:



Zoomed region, Post-Processed:


Dan

Dan, that's really interesting. How's does the software achieve the correction from data that is already clipped ?
Also, what does this do in the subjective realm of what you hear ?

Hi Nick,

There were a number of steps involved in the "remastering" repair attempt and I have those detailed somewhere on one of my computers, but I'm not sure where those notes are at the moment.

From what I recall, I used Cool Edit to reduce the overall level of the audio, I think I reduced the volume by 5 or 10 dB in order to provide some headroom. Then I used a 3rd party plugin for Cool Edit that mathematically attempts to restore the audio peaks that are clipped in the waveform. How it does this is beyond my knowledge, but from the waveform images you can see it does a respectable job.

Of course, these restored peaks are only a best-guess, since you can only approximate at what the original waveform would have looked like.

One thing to note is that I did not attempt to try and increase the dynamic range of the audio, all of my feeble attempts sounded worse than the original. So the end result still had a compressed dynamic range, it just wasn't bumped up against the ceiling of full-scale. Plus, the clipped peak flat-tops were removed.

The perceived sonic benefits of this work is quite subjective and likely is also dependent on the playback chain of equipment being used. That is, different equipment will likely behave differently to full-scale audio and clipped peaks.

For me, I found that my efforts resulted in the music being less fatiguing and less "crackling". The latter I believe to be the result of the waveform flat-tops.

BTW, the issues with the Vapor Trails CD sparked a raging war between various parties on a lot of Rush message boards that still flares up from time to time. One side of the debate centers on the hot-mastering and waveform peak-clipping as the root of all evil in the audio world, while the other side of the debate believes that this is the artists' intent and how dare someone believe otherwise. Quite entertaining, though a tiresome debate.

Personally, I feel the examples of clipped peaks I found in the audio waveforms clearly illustrate sloppy mastering of the CD and is a situation that should never happen.

Dan

I've signed up. Hope this could really bring benefit to Hi-Fi music lovers.

Cheers

Ermanno

Missed this post somehow. Overly compressed recordings have been a frustrating thing to me for a number of years. It kills the live feel and immediacy of music. And overcompression is particularly rampant in the rock/pop/blues recordings that make up most of my listening. Very tough for the non-classical music fan audiophile to find stuff that hasn't been compressed within an inch of its life. After all, Phil Spector said rock 'n roll is compression.

Chesky Records is a, uh, loud proponent of no compression. Check out this article:

http://www.davidchesky.com/articles.html

it touches on the subject. Some great Chesky stuff includes:

http://www.chesky.com/core/details.cfm?PRODUCTCODE=JD164&productcategoryid=

http://www.chesky.com/core/details.cfm?PRODUCTCODE=JD196&productcategoryid=1


I'm very cognizant of this issue when I review stuff. We kill ourselves to make our systems sound great, but SQ is so often undermined at the beginning of the chain.

Unfortunately the masses went out and bought ipods instead of DVD Audio players. Money talks and now things are so bad even Metallica fans are complaining about the lack of dynamics.

Bit late to the thread, but poor mastering (i.e. compression, clipping) is a really big issue for modern records.

I've done a survey on my own music collection to try and identify the good and the bad. Results with graphs here:
http://www.codebunny.org/audio/quality/index.html

Duncan

Received my first CD produced with a Turn Me Up! logo...

Edensong - The Fruit Fallen.

Haven't had a chance to listen to it yet.

Mark

Although it's covered in the split-off thread for ( HDCD ), I think it's worth putting a statement into this thread about the HDCD discs. I've had chance to listen to those that I have decoded and think that they all benefit nicely from the treatment. There's no harshness or sense of compression in any of them.

Well worth the effort in the pursuit of decompressed listening.

Any queries/comments on the HDCD subject should of course be directed to the other thread.