Continuing off topic... On "correction"; it's an interesting philosophical concept. I listen to lots of audio books, and the program material comes with all kinds of problems. Noise, too low volume due to spurious noise+peak-limiting, too much dynamics etc. My typical listening device is my laptop's internal speaker which doesn't play very loud (nor well), so too low volume is often a problem.
I have been thinking about a processing chain that might solve some of these issues. 1) Steep filter to isolate speech (100-4k?). 2) Noise gate 3) Some kind of "crystalizer" for extra "crunch"/contrast 4) Compression 5) Amplification to 0 - -3 dBFS What do you think? cheers, Emanuel On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 11:47 AM, Sampo Syreeni <de...@iki.fi> wrote: > On 2014-02-28, Richard Dobson wrote: > > Apart from obvious true/false things such as digital clipping, it seems >> to me that very little in musical audio can, in any scientific >> deterministice way, be called either "correct" or "incorrect". >> > > I'd argue even for clipping in some cases. Judiciously used it's just > another waveshaper, with nice, crunchy qualities. > > > Yet even the modern fad for "death by compression", in the "loudness >> wars" is ostensibly a "correct" commercial decision. >> > > Not to mention, it's impossible to "correct" something like that. The > trouble is, nowadays compression is not just a mostly-transparent > afterthought used to fit the dynamics into a limited channel and applied in > an open loop manner. It's part of the aesthetics of the music, which feeds > back so that the music itself is made to be compressed. The effect is the > same as with Gregorian chant: if you somehow managed to deconvolve out the > whole massive reverb, you wouldn't be left with a more correct version, but > something which was never intended to be played except as the excitation to > the instrument that is the space. > > > As recording purists we may not like it, but can't really argue about >> correctness or otherwise. Clearly you have every right to season or >> otherwise transform your music library in whatever way you choose, for your >> own listening pleasure. People have done that with hifi tone controls (and >> even those silly EQ controls) since amplifiers were invented. >> > > You're going to be adding a lot of unknowns and distortion sources to the > mix, however, if you start with blind processing of whatever comes out of a > modern studio. I can just barely agree with the idea of automatic mastering > to some kind of a tonal template, but going the other way around I think > mostly just leads to unpleasant surprises and a lot of crud which is > difficult to avoid without going back at least to the final pre-mastering > mix, or perhaps as far as the original composition. > > I also believe the examples Theo's given earlier lend some perceptual > support to my point. Despite lots of clever processing, the end result at > least to me just seems hazier than the original. > -- > Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - de...@iki.fi, http://decoy.iki.fi/front > +358-40-3255353, 025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2 > > -- > dupswapdrop -- the music-dsp mailing list and website: > subscription info, FAQ, source code archive, list archive, book reviews, > dsp links > http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/music-dsp > http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/music-dsp > -- dupswapdrop -- the music-dsp mailing list and website: subscription info, FAQ, source code archive, list archive, book reviews, dsp links http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/music-dsp http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/music-dsp
