Dynamic Range (and Bit Depth Part 2)

Ah the boring technical aspects of audio production. I love it!

So before I talk about Bit Depth, I want to talk briefly about dynamic range.  Dynamic range is essentially the difference in volume from the loudest to quietest portion of audio in a waveform at any given moment. This is also call this the crest factor.

When people talk about the dynamics of a song, they tend to be talking about how loud or squashed sounding a song is. Songs with wide dynamics tend to sound open and airy. Songs with limited dynamics sound punchy and hyped in the best case to squished and crunchy in the worst of cases.

An example of hyped and punchy is Pearl Jam's Dissident. It has a dynamic rage of 8, which is about the minimum level of dynamic rage. Higher numbers are even better in this day and age of volume normalization and web streaming.

An example of squished and crunchy  is none other than Metallica's Death Magnetic. If you look it up on youtube, fans remastered the album from guitar hero stems and it sounds way better than the PRO master! The below video shows the difference between the retail version and the less squished guitar hero version. The difference is stark!!

It pains me so see a lot of Christian recording artists and Worship artists becoming victims of the loudness wars. At work, we sometimes put on Praise 101 and I can stand it for about 30 seconds. Everything is hyper squashed and distorted. Ugh!

All recordings have a dynamic range before mastering, and it's the job of the mastering engineer to decide if the dynamic range is well suited for the song and the album, or if the dynamic range needs to be increased (made quieter) or reduced (made louder). Mastering Engineers can do both. Reducing the dynamic range is quite a bit more difficult than increasing it, FYI.

So when someone talks about "squashing the dynamic range" or "over limiting" or "over compression", what does it mean?What we are really talking about is taking the dynamic range that a track already has and reducing it too much. As a rule of thumb, around 8db-10db of dynamic range is plenty good.

Here's to your music!
Ryan