RE: Why contemporary everything sounds terrible

["L.A. Angulo" <labaloops@yahoo.com>]

I hear you, here is Germany the ads are so loud i
thought there was a problem with my system at first!
it is brutally anoying, i feel sorry for a lot of
childrens ears(or maybe i am becoming an old fart:-)
Luis



> with radio & tv broadcasting, it's been a simple
> matter of balancing your punch-through power against
> this business of listener fatigue. doesn't matter
> whether the listener is in heavy traffic or not.
> 
> I am personally responsible for achieving this
> balance at MTV Europe, with about two dozen
> tc-electronic dBmax devices. but here, we are
> showing music videos & programmes with a lot of
> music/shouting/random noises in amongst, well,
> commercials. so there's not really a lot of variety
> for the ear anyway. I have done the same for a
> couple of movie channels, though, so I know what the
> perils of over-compression are....
> 
> dolby labs have this thing that they use to track
> the dialogue level in movies, which works quite well
> but requires a total, end-to-end buy-in to dolby's
> world. while they've been quite forthcoming with
> their technology, there's still a license fee for
> it, & on top of that, there's a great deal of sniffy
> "not-invented-here" in the pro-audio world,
> especially when it comes to the movie industry.
> 
> other broadcasters I have met with, who receive the
> same commercials from the same ad agencies, have a
> problem that's familiar to any british tv viewers &
> probably many in the US & europe; the commercials
> are competing with each other for your attention. 
> if they come on in the ad-break of a particularly
> emotionally-complex movie, which has been cut so
> that there's an end-of-act "moment" for the viewer
> to ponder, it's like being whacked in the face with
> a shovel. 
> I spoke to one broadcaster whose movie seasons were
> sponsored by a belgian beer company, & somehow
> managed to get them to reduce the audio level of the
> sponsorship "bumpers" in & out of the ad-breaks so
> that the transition was a little more user-friendly.
> the rest of the UK doesn't know it was me that
> achieved this, of course.....
> 
> mastering one's own material is much more difficult
> because of this "everything louder than everything
> else" trend. your average engineer (& I am one)
> will, at some point, think "why am I bothering to
> preserve more than 30dB of dynamic across this
> album, when the radio station is just going to
> flatten it all out anyway?". if he's not worried
> about that, then it might occur to him in a similar
> way that his work is going to fetch up in an i-pod
> or on the internet or in some otherwise data-reduced
> form, & that the best hope for all the meticulously
> recorded detail, with this data reduction in
> prospect, is for it to be as loud as possible.
> or he might just be following some natural instinct
> & keeping everything as far away from the noise
> floor as possible. which is ironic, given that we're
> supposed to be so much better off in that respect
> these days.
> 
> y'can't win.
> 
> duncan. 
> 
> 


www.myspace.com/luisangulocom


 
____________________________________________________________________________________
We won't tell. Get more on shows you hate to love 
(and love to hate): Yahoo! TV's Guilty Pleasures list.
http://tv.yahoo.com/collections/265