On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 2:28 AM, Charles Haynes <[email protected]> wrote: > People saying this drives me nuts. Perhaps I'm being over picky but > what they're really doing is over compressing the dynamic range. > > The maximum "loudness" for a given digital medium is fixed. To make > music sound "louder" what they're really doing is keeping the loudest > sounds fixed at the max and making the quieter parts "louder" - i.e. > compressing the sound into the upper end and reducing the dynamic > range. > > THAT is the travesty. They're losing detail and subtlety to people who > are too lazy to adjust the volume on their listening device.
The first time I heard someone talking about this, I thought, "More audiophile silliness." But then I noticed that I tended to skip newer music when in shuffle mode. I realised that I found newer music fatiguing to listen to -- because they're often just a wall of sound. I'm no audiophile -- my primary listening environment is my car, for God's sake -- but even I find this trend irritating. -- b
