Airwave's post about Mastering

[Progrez]

Sooo, where are we going to my friends? Without sounding too much like a nerd, the audio quality went downhill the last 3 years, clubs adopting a very cold sound system and digital mixers too. Everyone pushing his audio to the limit when mastering, going through all those digital stages, in the end, I hear a lot of decibels, but no more music. Because in music there's silence, too. What's your views on this?

http://www.facebook.com/airwavefanpage/posts/10151006499105792

What do you think?

[thijsje]

It's difficult:


Yes, from my heart speaking, music needs silence to feel it's loudness.


Aside of that there's indeed the discussion of numbers of decibels themselves. Lot of people complaining about tinitus or use earplugs to listen their favorite DJ's. Is there anyone who can explain this?

[Voci]

Well I personally find it strange that it is quite NORMAL to "wear earplugs" when you go to a trance event.
Does it have to be that loud that everyone needs to wear earplugs? Isn't that a sign of being too loud???

That's offtopic though I know, this is about the loudness war. As long as people buy the music, and producers of 'badly-mastered' music will have a career, this will happen.

It's a lot cheaper to do a bad master yourself than havin an actual mastering engineer doing a great job for 100 euro.

[aki]

He's damn right. people don't know mastering, just putting a limiter on it and max it out lol. #fail. Whoever may be interested, send a track to me and i'll master it for free and show what's possible when things are a bit softer

[Alex E]

I definitely feel that the loudness is too much these days, at pretty much all events and bars. A problem is that a lot of people don't even notice that anymore because they're partially deaf.

It's a damn shame actually, because this not only screws up your ears but also kills the quality. Certain sounds are just cut off or sound like absolute crap to at least play it at that dB-level. Not only in the mastering but also live, concessions are made to quality for the sake of the loudness. Strange choices are being made there.

I personally try to have the sound at a volume that the loudest sounds in the tracks I play are just a tiiiny bit under the maximum, and the rest is well below it.