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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

There’s an analog analogue: mixing and mastering audio recordings for the devices of the era.

I first heard about this when reading an article or book about Jimi Hendrix making choices based on what the output sounded like on AM radio. Contrast that with the contemporary recordings of The Beatles, in which George Martin was oriented toward what sounded best in the studio and home hi-fi (which was pretty amazing if you could afford decent German and Japanese components).

Even today, after digital transfers and remasters and high-end speakers and headphones, Hendrix’s late 60s studio recordings don’t hold a candle anything the Beatles did from Revolver on.

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> There’s an analog analogue: mixing and mastering audio recordings for the devices of the era.

In the modern day, this has one extremely noticeable effect: audio releases used to assume that you were going to play your music on a big, expensive stereo system, and they tried to create the illusion of the different members of the band standing in different places.

But today you listen to music on headphones, and it's very weird to have, for example, the bassline playing in one ear while the rest of the music plays in your other ear.

That's with a naive stereo split. Many would still put the bass on one side, with the binaural processing so it's still heard on the right, but quieter and with a tiny delay.

Hard panning isn't naive. It's just a choice that presumes an audio playback environment.

If you're listening in a room with two speakers, having widely panned sounds and limited use of reverb sounds great. The room will mix the two speakers somewhat together and add a sense of space. The result sounds like a couple of instruments playing in a room, which is sort of is.

But if you're listening with a tiny speaker directly next to each ear canal, then all of that mixing and creating a sense of space must be baked into the two audio channels themselves. You have to be more judicious with panning to avoid creating an effect that couldn't possibly be heard in a real space and add some more reverb to create a spatial environment.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding him but I think he says the music track can have hard panning, and it's the headphone playback system that should do some compensatory processing so that it sounds as if it was played on two speakers in a room.

Don't ask me how it works but I know gaming headsets try to emulate a surround setup.

Yes, these sorts of compensation features have become common on higher end headphones.

One example:

> The crossfeed feature is great for classic tracks with hard-panned mixes. It takes instruments concentrated on one channel and balances them out, creating a much more natural listening experience — like hearing the track on a full stereo system.

https://us.sennheiser-hearing.com/products/hdb-630

No, they just didn't put much time into stereo because it was new and most listeners didn't have that format. So they'd hard pan things for the novelty effect. This paradigm was over by the early 70s and they gave stereo mixes a more intentional treatment.

A voice on the radio sounded better with vibrato, so that’s what they did before even recordings were made. Same when violins played.

These versions were for radio only and thought of as cheap when done in person.

Later this was recorded, and being the only versions recorded, later generations thought that this is how the masters of the time did things, when really they would be booed off stage (so to speak).

It’s a bit of family history that passed this info on due to being multiple generations of playing the violin.

Interesting!

And now we have the Loudness War where the songs are so highly compressed that there is no dynamic range. Because of this, I have to reduce the volume so it isn't painful to listen to. And this makes what should have been a live recording with interesting sound into background noise. Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

If you want a recent-ish album to listen to that has good sound, try Daft Punk's Random Access Memories (which won the Best Engineered Album Grammy award in 2014). Or anything engineered by Alan Parsons (he's in this list many times)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Award_for_Best_Engineer...

I was obsessed with Tales of Mystery & Imagination, I Robot, and Pyramids in the 70s. I also loved Rush, Yes, ELP, Genesis, and ELO, but while Alan Parsons' albums weren't better in an absolute musical sense, his production values were so obviously in a class of their own I still put Parsons in the same bucket as people like Trevor Horn and Quincy Jones, people who created masterpieces of record album engineering and production.

> now

Is this still a problem? Your example video is from nearly twenty years ago, RAM is over a decade old. I think the advent of streaming (and perhaps lessons learned) have made this less of a problem. I can't remember hearing any recent examples (but I also don't listen to a lot of music that might be victim to the practice); the Wikipedia article lacks any examples from the last decade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Thankfully there have been some remasters that have undone the damage. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and Absolution come to mind.

Certified Audio Engineer here. The Loudness Wars more or less ended over the last decade or so due to music streaming services using loudness normalization (they effectively measure what each recording's true average volume is and adjust them all up or down on an invisible volume knob to have the same average)

Because of this it generally makes more sense these days to just make your music have an appropriate dynamic range for the content/intended usage. Some stuff still gets slammed with compression/limiters, but it's mostly club music from what I can tell.

This goes along with what I saw growing up. You had the retail mastering (with RIAA curve for LP, etc.) and then the separate radio edit which had the compression that the stations wanted - so they sounded louder and wouldn't have too much bass/treble. And also wouldn't distort on the leased line to the transmitter site.

And of course it would have all the dirty words removed or changed. Like Steve Miller Band's "funky kicks going down in the city" in Jet Airliner

I still don't know if the compression in the Loudness War was because of esthetics, or because of the studios wanting to save money and only pay for the radio edit. Possibly both - reduced production costs and not having to pay big-name engineers. "My sister's cousin has this plug-in for his laptop and all you do is click a button"...

> I still don't know if the compression in the Loudness War was because of esthetics,

Upping the gain increases the relative "oomph" of the bass at the cost of some treble, right?

As a 90s kid with a bumping system in my Honda, I can confidently say we were all about that bass long before Megan Trainor came around. Everyone had the CD they used to demo their system.

Because of that, I think the loudness wars were driven by consumer tastes more than people will admit (because then we'd have to admit we all had poor taste). Young people really loved music with way too much bass. I remember my mom (a talented musician) complaining that my taste in music was all bass.

Of course, hip hop and rap in the 90s were really bass heavy, but so was a lot of rock music. RHCP, Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Slipknot come to my mind as 90s rock bands that had tons of bass in their music.

Freak on a Leash in particular is a song that I feel like doesn't "translate" well to modern sound system setups. Listening to it on a setup with a massive subwoofer just hits different.

> Korn

It wasn't the bass, but rather the guitar.

The bass player tuned the strings down a full step to be quite loose, and turned the treble up which gave it this really clicky tone that sounded like a bunch of tictacs being thrown down an empty concrete stairwell.

He wanted it to be percussive to cut through the monster lows of the guitar.

That makes sense, thanks for the reply!

Music, as tracked by Billboard, cross genre, is as loud as ever. Here’s a survey of Billboard music:

https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/mastering-trends?srsltid=Af...

I have an Audio Developer Conference talk about this topic if you care to follow the history of it. I have softened my stance a bit on the criticism of the 90’s (yeah, people were using lookahead limiting over exuberantly because of its newness) but the meat of the talk may be of interest anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hj7PYid_tE

As an ex audio engineer, I would say that the war ended and loudness won.

It's still a problem, although less consistently a problem than it used to be for the reason entropicdrifter explained.

There's a crowdsourced database of dynamic range metrics for music at:

https://dr.loudness-war.info/

You can see some 2025 releases are good but many are still loudness war victims. Even though streaming services normalize loudness, dynamic range compression will make music sound better on phone speakers, so there's still reason to do it.

IMO, music production peaked in the 80s, when essentially every mainstream release sounded good.

> decent German and Japanese components

Whoa there! Audio components were about the only thing the British still excelled at by that time.

British music of the 60s and 70s was pretty great to listen to on that hifi.

I wasn't aware of home hi-fi but British gear for musicians was widespread when I was growing up (Marshall, Vox, etc).

I was specifically thinking of the components my father got through the Army PX in the 60s and the hi-fi gear I would see at some friends' houses in the decades that followed ... sometimes tech that never really took hold, such as reel-to-reel audio. Most of it was Japanese, and sometimes German.

I still have a pair of his 1967 Sansui speakers in the basement (one with a blown woofer, unfortunately) and a working Yamaha natural sound receiver sitting next to my desk from about a decade later.

Wharfedale (1920s) and Cambridge Audio (1960s) were there, and are still making great home hifi.

I've noticed this with lots of jazz from the 50s and 60s. Sounds amazing in mono but "lacking" in stereo.

Because it's mono?

That’s more due to mono being the dominant format at the time so the majority of time and money went to working on the mono mix. The stereo one was often an afterthought until stereo became more widespread and demand for good stereo mixes increased.

The same with movie sound mixing, where directors like Nolan are infamous for muffling dialogue in home setups because he wants the sound mixed for large, IMAX scale theater setups.

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