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

Best (and Worst) Tips I've ever Gotten - #3 Intersample Peaks

This isn't so much a post from me as it is a post from another website. But this gives you an excellent idea about why it's important to do the following:

1. Gain Stage properly throughout your studio's signal chain 
2. Make sure you leave enough headroom for mp3 and downsampling conversion in your final mixes.

Enjoy!

http://www.hometracked.com/2007/11/08/prevent-intersample-peaks/

Best (and worst) Recording Advice I've ever gotten #2 - Digital OVERS

Image courtesy of Reaper Audio

I was at a recording studio this one time watching my Dad record some tracks for a release he and his band were working on.

Dad was playing his beautiful old Yamaha acoustic guitar hard, and it was clipping the digital audio interface. It sounded terrible. The engineer commented that he needed to record as hot as possible, to make sure the signal was healthy enough to mask any background noise (that's bad advice ... more on that later). He also commented that a few digital overs were no big deal, since his interface (an RME something or other) was pretty forgiving.

This is bad advice #1. There is no such thing as a "forgiving" digital over. However, there is such a thing as forgiving clipping within the analog domain. The difference is hard vs soft clipping. With digital audio, you are either clipped or not. You can model pleasing analog clipping and saturation with plugins (Variety of sound makes some really cool free analogue modeled VST plugins),

Perhaps the "forgiving" part of digital clipping is whether you have the ability to actually hear the digital overs - but this is just whether your monitoring system is accurate, because a digital over is a digital over. It exists whether you can hear it or not. The problem areas you don't perceive will need to be fixed during mastering. If your mastering engineer is really good, he or she might be able to use some expensive restoration tools to make the digital overs less nasty sounding. But you honestly NEVER want to have to get to that point in the first place, because there will be unintended trade-offs to repairing your poorly recorded tracks.

Here's a picture to drive this point home. Notice the greyed out parts of the sound file represented below. This information should have been there, as it is the would-be of an audible sound. But, because the audio is digitally clipped, the information is literally sliced off and you are left with a terrible sounding crackle that masks the depth and detail of the sound.

Image courtesy of wikimedia

Here is a 16 minute video that further explains digital clipping vs analogue clipping extremely well, courtesy of Mastering Engineer Ian Sheppard.

Oh, and you might be wondering what happened to my Dad's clipped guitar recording? Since the engineer wouldn't turn down his pre-amps, I told my dad to play quieter, knowing that the engineer would simply raise the volume of the track in the mix. This worked like a charm - he recorded a really nice sounding track to complement the song.

Until Next Time,
Here's to your music,
Ryan

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