Back catologue in 5.1 / DTS

[King of Snake]

Originally Posted by Jan

I don't know what drum machines UW use exactly, but I do know for sure that their drum machine shows that behavior. Here is a closeup on a kick of Crocodile. You can see how the waveform suddenly drops down and up again. Both Rowla and Confusion have very prominent kicks, thats why I used them in the comparison. And it's surely no DC offset because the waveform is perfectly centered. The pic of the waveform is a bit misleading. Here is a better one.

hmm well maybe it's just the way your program visualises the waveform. When you look at the individual kicks, you get that pronounced downward slope (this tends to happen with kickdrum or other sharp percussive sounds and is not really dependent on any particular machine, it's just an idication of the sharp attack of the sound), but it doesn's show up in the zoomed out picture in Wavelab as it does in your picture.

May I ask what CD your waveform is from?
I've just checked, and all my copies of STITI have that.

I used a normal european version I guess. What is the software you're using? It will probably show up the same if with me if I used that software...

[Jan]

You could try Audacity as it's free... But it's still the same waveform... the sharp transients just do down.

Originally Posted by joethelion

you really don't notice it when you're just listening to Dubno, or hell - even other electronic albums from that time period, but when you compare the 'classics' to more contemporary stuff... it's a bit of a difference

Yeah, that's what record producers usually want to archieve. They intentionally sacrifice sound quality in exchange for more loudness, which makes the recording seem better. And without loudness correction it will sound better than the quieter one.

But that's where RG comes into play...
http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/6...bar2000cs0.png
When I play old, well mastered albums like STITI, the volume stays just about the same. But when I play newer stuff, the volume gets lowered to match the RG reference level.

The waveform from the example above looks like this:
http://img230.imageshack.us/img230/7...parisonlf5.png
STITI makes use of nearly all the available dynamic range. But BS 2003 and AHDO, after their volume got lowered, are wasting much headroom.

This all becomes even more depressing looking at a closeup on a single kick from Little Speaker:
http://img230.imageshack.us/img230/6...speakervn1.png
While limiting has been applied to Little Speaker, the transients from the kicks have been cut off. I can only guess where they were in the original but I marked it in red.

Fortunately, though, most modern limiters don't introduce clipping or distortion anymore. But sharp attacks in the sound will be damaged or buried in the mix. And that sounds like this:
http://www.mediafire.com/?l2im4xf9y7m
This is the comparison between the original and a compressed Rowla I posted earlier.

[King of Snake]

Originally Posted by Jan

You could try Audacity as it's free... But it's still the same waveform... the sharp transients just do down.

ok it looks the same for me in Audacity, so it's just a difference in the software and the way it draws the waveform.

This all becomes even more depressing looking at a closeup on a single kick from Little Speaker:
http://img230.imageshack.us/img230/6...speakervn1.png
While limiting has been applied to Little Speaker, the transients from the kicks have been cut off. I can only guess where they were in the original but I marked it in red.

Fortunately, though, most modern limiters don't introduce clipping or distortion anymore. But sharp attacks in the sound will be damaged or buried in the mix. And that sounds like this:
http://www.mediafire.com/?l2im4xf9y7m

well this is a bit of an oversimplification. There's no reason why that closeup of the little speaker kickdrum means anything "depressing" has happened. It's just a normal result of limiting and compression, both perfectly valid tools for shaping and sculpting sound. What matters is the overall mix, and indeed as you say a lot of stuff these days is over-compressed/limited and has lost punch and definition. I've never found this to be the case for Underworld records though, even when some of them obviously have been processed more heavily than others.