[MLA] Interesting info about Spotify normalization

[Bob Katz]

Dynamics processing in streaming on mastered material is just another 
backwards step to the ugly Orban, ugly-sounding and ugly radio land. No 
ONE, I mean no ONE knows what's optimal for every venue. NO ENGINEER has 
preknowlege of what the user's venue or user's conditions are going to 
be.  And giving the user the choice rarely results in anything good.

Furthermore, presets called "Loud" and "Normal" are just ways of making 
the sound "squashed" and "more squashed". Applying downward compression, 
limiting and Orban style processing presets on top of music which can 
vary from the most unprocessed to the most smashed is just going to 
further and seriously distort the smashed recordings, and ruin the depth 
and clarity of any high quality material. Thus returning to the 
distortions that we successfully got rid of by inventing R-128 in the 
first place! This is WHY the EBU and ATSC do NOT advocate ANY loudness 
processing, simply loudness normalization. Do you think that Spotify 
knows better than experienced broadcast engineers?

There are two proper solutions to the noisy venue problem. The eventual 
and proper one is to move to is a noise-based processor that 
incorporates the microphone in the user device and raises the gain of 
low level material without any level-based time-constants.

As we wait for a microphone-noise-based processor to be perfected, I 
would propose interim presets labeled "noisy environment" "medium noisey 
environment' and "quiet environment". These would use parallel 
compression which is designed to be invisible at high levels and only 
effective meaningful at low levels. NOT the kind of processing that I 
wager Spotify is using. I wager they're using ugly, undiscriminated, 
downward compression and limiting.

Otherwise vendors and streamers should keep their noses out of the 
processing business. It failed and sucked with radio and they're just 
bound to repeat the mistakes of FM radio :-(



Let's call a spade a spade and do things right.


Bob



On 3/16/18 12:07 PM, Kevin Gross wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 3:22 AM, Grimm | Eelco <eelco at grimmaudio.com 
> <mailto:eelco at grimmaudio.com>> wrote:
>
>
>     Let’s hope we can nudge Apple to implement the “extra headroom
>     with normalization on” option soon. Then we just switch to a -23
>     LUFS target and have a beer :-)
>
>     Cheers,
>     Eelco
>
> We have talked in this group in the past about the potential need for 
> different processing for different listening scenarios. Spotify is 
> touching on this with their "Loud", "Normal", "Quiet" options. Based 
> on the fact that loudness-normalized material is played off a 
> different server, it appears they're doing some dynamics processing. 
> We've said that we'd look at this once we had solid recommendations 
> for unprocessed loudness normalization. Maybe it is time to get started.
>
> Kevin
>
>
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-- 

If you want good sound on your album, come to Bob Katz 407-831-0233 
DIGITAL DOMAIN MASTERING STUDIO Author: *Mastering Audio *Digital Domain 
Website <http://www.digido.com/> No trees were killed in the sending of 
this message. However a large number of electrons were terribly 
inconvenienced.

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