Tips for a Personal Music Archive

[Nicholas Leippe]

On Wednesday 05 March 2008, Michael L Torrie wrote:
> Ironically, those people who won't tolerate this kind of garbage do
> tolerate the horrible mixing and volume levels of any recent recording.
>  Even vocal and orchestrated music is recorded this way nowadays.  It's
> horrible.  The subtle nuances of the quieter tones are all drown out by
> the volume compression.  Even on a basic CD we have 20 bits to mess with
> yet all the studios make the sound as loud as they can, reducing the
> amount of useful sound levels.  Instead of pristine, 20-bit sound, it's
> often all packed into the upper 4 bits (amplitude-wise). Why they do
> this is beyond me. My stereo is perfectly capable of expanding and
> amplifying the signal.
>
> Maybe this all comes out of the Phil Spectre idea of the wall of sound.
>   I dunno.

Well, you just have to tolerate what you have no say over.
I agree, it's really lame that most CDs nowadays are sampled so high that they 
are already clipping the signal... all for the sake of sounding louder on the 
radio--and they get away with it because radio stations don't actually have 
someone there playing music, monitoring the volume--they just hit the 'play' 
button and let their purchased playlist run. For all we know, they just play 
the music from itunes now anyways...