When HI-RES AUDIO stops making sense...

This video is brought to you by Primare:

🎥 Camera: John Darko
🎬 Editor: John Darko
🌈 Colour: Olaf von Voss
🕺🏻 Motion GFX: John Darko
💰 Ad segment: Jana Dagdagan

👉 As mentioned in this video...

Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense

Stop Making Sense 2023 movie trailer

DR Loudness database

The Loudness Wars: Why Music Sounds Worse

Sony PCM-3324 (as used to record SMS's sound digitally)

Streaming platform by Roon

Cables and power products by AudioQuest

Hi-fi furniture and speaker stands by Solid Steel

Room treatment by Vicoustic

Darko.Audio may earn a small commission from items purchased via affiliate links, which are indicated with a '🛒'.

#remaster #hiresaudio #hifi

__________________________________________________________________
📖 PLEASE READ *before commenting*!
1) Polite comments that advance the conversation are most welcome
2) No URLs, racist/sexist remarks or conspiracy theories
3) All comments here are moderated by a third party

__________________________________________________________________
⏰ How our YouTube videos get made:

Darko.Audio FAQ:

Why are/were comments turned OFF?

What the bloody hell am I talking about?

How is Darko.Audio funded?
__________________________________________________________________
🎧 Check out the Darko.Audio podcast:

__________________________________________________________________

[bitterandjaded_]

As someone that remembers listening to Talking Heads on cassette, with the headphones that came with my Walkman, while mowing the lawn, pretty much everything sounds better now.

[mrsharps]

I feel like this is the definitive case study on why vinyl or bit rate alone will not guarantee the best audio quality. Bravo!

[darrylbrueckner]

My older brother and his friend rented Stop Making Sense on VHS back in 1987. They were cool enuff to let me watch with them. My 14 yr old brain was blown away. I remember hopping on the bus and buying Fear of Music and Speaking in Tongues on LP later that week. I still have them. What a trip to discover and work through Talking Heads' catalogue at that age. Life-long fan ever since.

[mwalker]

John - this is the most IMPORTANT and REVELATORY video you've ever made!
I couldn't understand why my original CD's sounded better than my supposed new 'Remastered' CD's and Hi Rez file downloads. It's like when we were duped into believing that digital was always better than analog in the '80's.
I'm off to buy up all the cheap, original early NON remastered CD versions!

[AllboroLCD]

HUGE thing to also note is that Talking Heads have had quite the good track record as far as new mixes on new formats go, more so than most artists. The surround mixes are superb!

[pixelmixture]

This loudness war is a plague … fueled by the adoption of crappy Bluetooth mono speakers and crappy in ear headphones …

[gotham]

The elephant in the room that wasn’t mentioned is that the original mix was from a Sony PCM-3324 DASH recorder, which has a maximum resolution of 48k 16bit. Any version claiming higher resolution than that has been upsampled

[syanhc]

As a recording artist and studio producer, I enjoyed this quite a lot. Compression is a tool to be used delicately. It is necessary to balance dynamics between sole tracks so that they balance each other in the mix. But overall dynamic range compression can be a terrible thing if done without sensitivity. It's a testament to the engineers that recorded it and later mastered it that a live recording back in the 80s was recorded so well. Because it's usually live recordings that suffer badly under the compression tool as a producer tries to account for live variables. Anyway, it's great to watch that live Blu-ray. We forget how brilliant and innovative Talking Heads were. My fav band... Prince's Sign of the Times. Another brilliant live concert movie....❤

[gavinhall]

It should be pointed out that a track being "high dynamic range" is not necessarily a universal good. It's great in a quiet listening environment, but in a car or a bus, you end up turning up the volume to hear the quiet sections, and then get your head blown off by the loud sections. It's almost like there need to be separate masters, labeled as such, depending on the use case.

[xentakis]

And you may ask yourself: “What is the dynamic range like?”

[skaushi]

excellent !
my friends made me believe that “ THAT SOUND” you are not able to find in new hi res music is purely nostalgia, but I was convinced that my CDs from early 90s actually sounded better

[jamesdwright]

We need more videos like this John. A fascinating discussion on the merits of good mastering vs, bit rate and audio format. The more people realise this the sooner we can move away from remastered dynamically compressed releases.

[legrandmaitre]

As I've said before, it's not about the format, it's about the music.
In my case I have many LPs which never came out on CD - and now in 2023 I have many CDs that aren't available on LP.
I think loudness wars did enormous damage to the CD format's reputation.
At my age I have a pretty big collection, and for music that I really love I usually have several CD editions, often the LP as well. For me, in pretty well 90% of cases, it's the pre-loudness war CDs which come out on top and get played the most.

In recent years, I've kind of developed a new hifi mentality - that my system is there to "serve my collection". As I can't have all the music I love in perfect sound then I need that can handle just about everything.

[Phil_fandbethere]

I try to avoid re-masters if possible, as it's as you say, a fancy way of saying "made louder". The best sounding CDs are generally the ones made in the 80s and early 90's, after that it's pot luck on how good a job they have done. It's why vinyl often sounds better than CD, because they have to master it differently so it works on vinyl. Great video JD. Music first, mastering second, format last.

[GeneSavage]

THANK YOU!!! Garbage in = garbage out.

The only other thing I'd mention, that will drive you crazy, is that sometimes you can have a recording that shows greater dynamic range not because it is less compressed but because it's been messed with, maybe resampled or high or low pass filtered or something else, which has caused what are called "overshoots." They don't improve the actual dynamics, they just push the average volume of everything down because of these very transient spikes.

These often are coming from copies of copies of master tapes... meaning that it may register as greater dynamic range, but have more tape hiss.

...Then again, NO tape hiss may indicate aggressive noise reduction has been used, which can dull the highs...

I love this hobby, and I hate it, all at the same time. I wish record labels would release absolutely flat dumps of their master tapes and let US choose to "remaster" them ourselves if we wanted.

[ChristosTsitselis]

After this video I am considering to create 1000 accounts to subscribe again with each one of them. Your Channel and work is like an oasis inside the hottest desert. Thanks for this darko. Kudos from Athens Greece

[richh]

Excellent discussion! There are very few remasters that are better than the original as most modern sound engineers appear to be idiots now.

[rwilifeandtravel]

Great video. With all the technical advancements I hoped that the loudness wars would be well and truly over by now. At the very least there could be two versions: the highly compressed version and what I call the musical version.

[beachroadfilms]

Great article. Please do more like this. I ripped the Blue ray using "DVD Audio Extractor" and measure a DR of 14 on my 24 bit rip, not the 13 you mention.

[patrikbjorling]

I am doing the laundry and I had to pause and give you a huge HUG because this is VERY important stuff that no one seems to care about these days..back to laundry.