> Letterpress printing historically didn’t try to put much bite into printing, preferring what’s called a kiss impression—just perfectly laying the ink on top of the paper. Martha Stewart popularized debossing because, unlike real letterpress, it felt like letterpress.
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided… It’s the sound of failure.”
That quote is from Brian Eno’s 1996 book, so he knows his stuff.
I’m guessing he’s referring to early CDs when both mastering and player DACs had digital roughness. Or maybe he’s talking about digital clipping which was deliberately being introduced in the 1990s to create loudness.
Just now I'm wondering why or how we ended up in the loudness war to begin with.
Why wouldn't radio stations just normalize all digital files they're playing to one default volume / loudness? Then "louder" digital songs would only be worse quality / fewer dynamics, but not louder at all.
Sounds like the radio stations are very much complicit. (Also: why are tv or radio ads always so much louder than the rest of their program?)
Normalization means adjusting the waveform’s amplitude to some level. That’s a precisely defined operation, an objective measure. But “loudness” is a different and perceptual thing. It’s a measure of “how loud” something feels to us, and I understand it depends on the overall dynamics and frequencies, and you can attempt to measure it through different algorithms / heuristics.
The loudness war wasn’t about normalizing to 0db vs -3db, but rather about dynamic compression which is a process that raises the volume of softer sounds without affecting the loudest ones as much (or at all). It’s what you use to make the breathiness of a singer’s voice, or a drum kit’s hi hat, more present in a recording.
annex-winged-cr · · focus · HN ↗
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided… It’s the sound of failure.”
meindnoch · · focus · HN ↗
Ah yes, that notorious -96dB noise.
pavlov · · focus · HN ↗
I’m guessing he’s referring to early CDs when both mastering and player DACs had digital roughness. Or maybe he’s talking about digital clipping which was deliberately being introduced in the 1990s to create loudness.
hobo123 · · focus · HN ↗
Why wouldn't radio stations just normalize all digital files they're playing to one default volume / loudness? Then "louder" digital songs would only be worse quality / fewer dynamics, but not louder at all.
Sounds like the radio stations are very much complicit. (Also: why are tv or radio ads always so much louder than the rest of their program?)
elondaits · · focus · HN ↗
The loudness war wasn’t about normalizing to 0db vs -3db, but rather about dynamic compression which is a process that raises the volume of softer sounds without affecting the loudest ones as much (or at all). It’s what you use to make the breathiness of a singer’s voice, or a drum kit’s hi hat, more present in a recording.
meindnoch · · focus · HN ↗