every single person who does anything with music needs to listen to this man

Awesome rant man, some really good points. . its also really interesting to put these audio files in recording programs and compare music from the 70s with modern music. Old school music has that crisp quality to it. That room to breath.

He hit the nail on the head. You never really hear a good, crisp recording anymore...

Shuffle mode has been in devices since the 80s, long before loudness wars. I still have a CD player I bought in 1986 and it has shuffle mode

Haha gotta love this guy. Totally agree.

"It's like there's something wrong with people" lmao.. that's an understatement. Great vid!

Wow I learn so much from this man everytime

Everything you laid out made so much sense. Some of the theories that are made by people in the industry are way out there. But lets face it, people in marketing are not engineers. They do not have the insights that the engineers and some of the musicians do.

I wish everyone who buys music had to listen to this. It's why we can't get any classics with epic moments any more like Phil Collins and other stuff like that.

Wholly agree with him. For those of you wondering the dynamic range of a certain album, Google 'Loudness Wars Database' on Google, and click on the first link.

Greg, I couldn't agree with you more, as an engineer all I hear is we want it loud!!! it's getting crazy thanks for the vid...

Great and informative presentation.

I love how he starts out being relatively reasonable about it, then gradually gets more and more pissed. I can't stand over compressed music either. Even the average person should be able to tell that a lot of music these days sounds like shit because all the dynamics are squashed out. If you don't think so, go listen to Dark Side of the Moon on vinyl and prepare to shit your pants.

Thank you for speaking up and openly about this area of nasties that need to be adressed and dealt with, Awareness is getting better and again nice one for telling it like it unfortunately is. Well said

Amen, Brother!

Damn, that was the best rant ever. Thanks for getting it on tape :D

I completely agree Greg! Well put!

I'm not a mastering engineer at all, but I want to learn about mastering and I thank you so much for this video.

He speaks truth.

Nicely said Greg!

Great rant! I think the way I master will immediately change.

Who do you want to satisfy more? Someone who just puts music on while running or doing something so that the time goes by faster, or someone who invests loads of money in his hi-fi equipment and actively listens to music for enjoyment, and actually appreciates the quality?

Well said!!

Amen. "Over the Hills and Faraway" define dynamics. Where did dynamics go?

This engineer is correct. I wish the general music business would wake up and hear people like him talking. Dynamic range is alway better than just loud..... Look at the moist enduring works of all times (Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt or any other major composer. They wrote music that went from very soft to extremely loud and people loved it. Music should be about how it affect the emotions of the person, not how deaf we can make them....

Absolutely right, man! I never understood the why you would have to make the master louder the the volume setting, when you've got the volume setting right there, on the remote. You want it loud? Knock yourself out. But leave the music on, while playing loud. With overcompression, you basically trade the song for the lazyness to use that remote.

The thinkers cap I can put on because I am an owner of a recording studio and know more or less what I am talking about. :) But people pirate music because the price is too high for buying a CD and the quality today sometimes is too low.

He is the BEST

New Nuisance! I liked that phrase!

Very well said!

So true; thank you for sharing. That ipod normalization on my 120Gb ipod doesn't work very well (does not seem to make any difference). But mp3s sound horrible compared to CDs and CDs sound horrible compared to DVDs. Still love vinyl and tape. I understand there are more vinyl manufacturers sprouting up of late!

Same thing as with everything: more glitter than gold. Its an typical example of this ethos of sensory over-saturation, at the expense of subtley, quality, cadence and dynamics.

Very informative and the proper education of sonic mastering fidelity. For example, Listen to John Mayer "Heavier Things". Clips/Distorts, and fatiguing, compared to Continuum, mastered by Greg Calbi...smooth and dynamic. I'm sure its not the mastering engineer on Heavier Things, but those who pushed him to over compress (or possibly ruined in the mixing process).

i like this guy!

I used to work in a bar with a guy who insisted on controlling the music, and he had it in his head that he always had to be playing the perfect song all the time at a volume that couldn't allow you to ignore it if you wanted to. I think he would make a good modern record executive.

So just turning the volume knob isn't an option for these people?

VEKTOR Black Future, is very loud but it has great production for digital recordings for new-rock sounds.

And here we are in 2022 still wondering why certain 'market forces' haven't learned that LOUD is a boring wall of sound. It's like looking at a curtain with pictures representing the outside, instead of looking through the actual windows.

I know all that. I'm just saying, the volume changing thing isn't a huge deal for me-I was only referring to volume. I wasn't comparing my iPod to thousands of dollars worth of speakers or anything.

It seems to me that a better approach would be to have an option on the playback device to adapt to the level based on the source material.

@Anaximander29A So after that the song has more Loudness. for example listen to old beatles albums and after that to the remasterd versions... try to find a calm part in the old ones. then listen to it in the remasterd version. you will see that this part will have nearly the same volume as the loud parts. sry for my english..

The point here is with perceived loudness, not signal level. I can listen to a LOUD track 20dB below a track with huge microdynamics and the LOUD track still sounds "louder" even though it is obvious that the dynamic track has more intensity. That is not to say that the LOUD track affects me more than the dynamic one, quite the opposite. Check Tool's "The Grudge." First verse = soft and dynamic, second = loud/compressed, still dynamic and gripping.

I like your outlook on the loudness war ! it does make me wounder if people really like what is louder because generally people like what they like ie style taste . i cant believe for one min that all these great artists would not be great if they where louder or lower .i would say great music is key and great music is what it is about . Making something louder does not suddenly turn it in to a hit record lol I think most professional engineers could tell u this !

well said

Greg Calbi would probably agree, man threw everything into the sound of vinyl albums. Lots of the audio enhancing electronic equipment was lost to time, rendering mastering note useless. I say some loudness enhancing is necessary to compete with vinyl sound.

i like this guy

@astrosmash1 the weird thing is that this Greg Calbi guy mastered the Sleater-Kinney album you're talking about

We need more people like this. I just done a video about this topic. Have a look if you like. You dont have to, but its there if you want to watch it.

My Hero!!!!!!! Fatiguing is a Huge deal, I like to spend hours enjoying music, but some you simple cant, my ears start to ring bad. If you have very good high quality speakers, quality quieter music sounds much better at high speaker volumes. Its just a fact. Loudness is not better, its an illusion for the ipod zombies.

when u use a sequencer like logic, cubase put a RMS-Meter on your master track. as far as i know this will give u the average volume of your track. when u put a compressor before the meter with very high ratio and a treshold above the most silent part, (be careful with attack and release) the RMS should be nearer to 0db now. so u increased the loudness.

Why would people who obviously don't care about audio "quality" care about a little less level in an effort to increase dynamic range?

cool dude!

Calbi, Katz, Athens, Grundman, Ludwig - those people are fathers of mastering engineers. Great thing is all those folks have in common is criticizing a Loudness War.

@gibsonguru15 it's not the volume...it's the dynamic. When the loudest part in a song is -5db and the most calm part is like -20db. then u can use a compressor to lower the maximum(-5db) to -15db. Then ur dynamic is only 5 db! After that you make everything louder. so that the loudest part is 0db and the most calm part is -5db now. (on a CD or any other digital medium 0db(fps) is the absolute maximum!! anything which is louder will clip and create ugly digital distortion.

AMEN!

The first comment here about turning the volume knob is a perfect example of someone having absolutely no clue what this video is about, as is the fact it got five thumbs up. What he's talking about when he says over compression is the quiet parts of a song being turned up so that they're as loud as the loud parts. And the parts that were originally loud end up being boosted so much that information is often lost and you get a horrible distorted sound. Think of compressing music as being like a rubbish compactor squashing cardboard. It makes the song one big rectangular shaped block of noise with no variation in sound. I'm by no means an audiophile (my CD player is pretty cheap as are my headphones) but I find most modern CDs, even remastered versions of old albums, to be unlistenable. Even the ones that don't immediately sound bad to my ears often end up giving me a headache. This doesn't just happen with hard rock/heavy metal. Pretty much every kind of music is messed around with in this way. It's an insult to the original producer of an album like, say, Present Tense by Sagittarius to completely strip it of all it's dynamic range and make it painful to listen to. There's usually no way of getting these CDs to sound good. If you listen to them at a reasonable volume they hurt. You either have to turn them down so low that you can barely hear them or suffer a headache. I'm not the kind of person that can wax lyrical about the technical aspects of audiophile recordings, but I can tell when something sounds like absolute shit.

Ringing, sure, but fatiguing is also in the brain. Sometimes it's good to just open a window and listen to the outdoors. (Unless you're in a city, tough luck then.)

Well said; I like this video a lot.. Why don't mp3 players have better normalization?

AMEN.

I agree with Greg Calbi, but it's a bit odd to hear him say all these things when he's mastered all of Interpol's albums, and they all measure a dynamic range of DR5 or DR6 (although I must say that the DR level meter gives a misleading reading). But I've read anecdotes from several mastering engineers who said they were trying their very best, but the artist was standing next to them, constantly saying "make it louder and brighter!". Maybe Interpol were doing that too. If he had then compressed Interpol's albums only to DR8 or at worst DR7 it might have been a bit better.

If this is his opinion why is all his work on Tame Impala exceedingly limited dynamically? He makes all of Kevin's music a complete brick wall of loud sound.

i want this guy to master my music

thats two separate masters. it can be done, its just twice the price! and most people listening to crappy speakers that dont have the range dont care anyway so the audiophile group is pretty small. not that i disagree, just life is hard

A lot of producers and mastering engineers talk about how wrong it is to make recordings too loud, but no one seems to do anything about it. To me it sounds like everybody's trying to "wash their hands" and blame everybody else. It's a little bit like a serial killer that is blaming young girls for his seek mind .. "Everybody's just coming on to me too strong, so I have no choice but to just kill them".. "I'm a great believer in life.. they just don't give me no choice" ...Bla bla bla…

Well, statistically, recordings keep getting hotter & more distorted. At the same time, sales keep dropping. One might say the general public doesn't like the loudness war either.

@VitalPatricia I agree. Piracy is just a symptom of industrial greed.

Thanks so much for this post, yes I agree totally with Greg, I also master my own music and that of others. Mastering is an art and you need to preserve the transients of the mix. For a case in point, listen to an Oasis song called "Some Might Say". This thing is seriously distorted in the chorus and gets really fatiguing after listening to it an few times in a row! Its a great song, but it sounds terrible! So if you do master your own stuff, dont push it too loud, you're ruining it! :-)

If you wish to become one, I know a studio in Manila who is seeking a musician to train as a mastering/recording engineer.

@petrisuhonen1 or the lake of dynamics :p

You do realize that if they did that, they'd simply lose their jobs. I want my record loud: do it, or I go to someone else. That said, supposedly there's a thing where engineers and producers have signed some "virtual" agreement where they would avoid the loudness wars. Personally, I don't think loudness is needed. I have Children of Bodom jumping to Gilbert & Sullivan on my iPod, and yes, I need to change the volume. I'd *prefer* a quieter Bodom, but whatever!

I bought some Greg calbi rolling stones CDs which are late 1980s they sound the best

I think your missing the point that the song is not just louder, It is compressing the dynamic range as you attempt to push the RMS higher and higher. This leads to peaks being compressed and the music sounding flat and distorted. Good dynamic music requires decent power to play, something your "Ipod" can not deliver properly. There should be the audiophile master and the I want my ears bleed version. This way all can be happy. No reason it can't be done.

The comment about the iPod playlist doesn't make much sense. If the song is in your playlist, then you already bought it. So from a selling point of view there is no competition. And why do people think louder is better anyway. I personally would turn the volume down, if a track is much louder than others. From a music selling point I say: High compressed music sounds bad, so I don't like to buy it, or listen to it. Labels should start to understand that. This why music is selling less!

The music industry is the ultimate real-life argument against the invisible hand of the market.

@infinitesimotel And also to dilute down true excitement and evocation. Its the same thing with movies, everything now is about how it looks as oppsed to what it says and how its put together to speak to the soul. Intense CGI, noise, explosions, silly manic music and fast cut montages. Just look at the difference between clash of the titans original and the 'remake'. If the content is good, it will be noticed.

Hey Greg. What happened on The Black Angels "Death Song" album?? It is terrible. An absolute Brick Wall. My guess is the band made you master it that way cause I know you are awesome. ✌️

@thermalmaximum Actually, making unmusical, over-cranked, undynamic tracks will backfire and keep the "marketplace" from getting excited to buy what greed is dishing out. This is already in full effect. Everybody concurs, "music sucks today." Total demoralisation of the buying public is the fault of the product. Whether the "marketplace" is conscious of "subtleties" or not, viscerally, the body reacts to truth. People get sick from pollution in their water whether they can detect it or not.

I listen to my ipod music for over 8 hours a day since I'm a software engineer. No fatigue. Sorry, the loudness wars is about sales. You can't sell me something that contradicts my experience.

its extremely unfair to blame the mastering engineer. ESPECIALLY one as talented and respected as greg calbi. mastering is a client service. obviously greg is upset with the fact that he is consistently asked to make records louder than they should be. and dont doubt for a second that he warns the client every time. also, you dont always know how loud a mix came in from the mix stage. some mix engineers do their own "premaster" loudness work, leaving the mastering engineer no choice.

but thats the problem. he talks about that modern productions do not have much dynamic. and i don't understand ur point. u can't make everything(!) dynamic AND loud. shure, the loudest(!) part in your music should be s.th. like 0db(fps). but when the most silent part in the track is like -5db(fps) then the dynamic is very low. but in that case everything in the track is loud. he don't talk about volume but loudness. loudness is more like the average volume.

Damn Skippy to everything he said.

the 70s dint have rebecca black singing friday... no wonder it wasnt fatiguing

Money. Cause when it all comes down to it at the end of the day hes in this make money

unfortunately most mixes are now mastered with the cookie cutter method, high levels of compression may work for dance club music but if you are recording anything which has dynamic content it totally loses the essence of the piece. Couldn't agree more with this video.

@thermalmaximum All this great work to be dumped to 8bit Ipods.

You know what's weird? At 4:05 to 4:18, it's almost like he's talking about the problem with the games industry today. The game industry is treating gamers the exact same way.

They hot master every song then put volume limits on i-pods and other portable devices so people don't damage their hearing! It doesn't make any sense. Lets put dynamics back into music and lose these daft restrictions.

Thats why nobody sells CDs today. Because the sound quality on the album and on you tube is almost the same!. There is so much compression that the drums are no longer crisp nor exiting. And here in Spain the average studios make their recordings so bad...the band wants loudness and they give it, charge a lot of money and the final product sounds like badly washed crap. I think with time they will start to compress less because the sales are no good...

Mastering Engineers need to stand up and refuse to master a loud record. I am sick of the horrible sound that all new music is. Also the remastering of older good music to push loudness is atrocious.

"Kids today, with their hair and their music."

Listen, anytime you have to tell people something sounds bad and something is tiring to their ears, it should be fairly obvious that it's not. Think about it. If modern music was so exhausting to listen to and so distorted that it sounds like poo, then what accounts for the millions of people who enjoy them? If it were so draining and distorted, then people would notice that automatically and not purchase it. The reality is, you have to sell them because otherwise, to them, it sounds good.

I am sorry but putting 20 Euros for an album it a too high a price...I never pirate music because I don't know how to do that sincerely, but I wont pay so much for a recording especially if it sounds bad.

THIS WAS STRAIGHT FROM THE SOUND CITY ERA OF SELLING MORE VINYL -END OF STORY

That's terrible. I'm in Europe. =(

@VitalPatricia people don't sell cds because other people are immoral. That's all. People still pirate the shit out of loud music, and they pirate it more than other, less loud, 'indie' music. So please don't put on your thinkers cap and decide you've solved the problem. The problem is human ethics. That's all. Bye.

Normalise and abused of side chain, and multiband compressor are realy a CANCER FOR THE EARS, if it's used for make the sound louder, come on get back the dynamic from the 60's 70's and 80's, im always suprised how good first edition of Pink Floyd, Supertramp or Kate Bush and even some Mike Oldfield like Amarok or Incantationn sound dynamic, even the first RHCP from the mid 90's sound good. why some idiots in music buisness want to squashed so hard the dynamic.

This really needs to stop. My ears hurt after listening to post year 2000 albums for 15 minutes, even at low volumes

Am I alone in thinking that this rant is accidentally hilarious?

That's what happens when you have thousands of people with no musical talent spewing out obscene trash for a bunch of tin-eared idiots to blast from their cars. They have no criteria by which to judge quality other than loudness. Most of them think a Crescendo is a new type of wheel for their 1982 Impala. Am I bitter?? Damn right! The music business in the toilet. No talent thugs calling themselves producers because they figured out two words that rhyme. Alan Parson's Project for me!

Money and profit is ruining music.