ARTIST, MANAGERS, LABELS, BROADCASTING .... AND MP3

[hermes]

Hello everyone.
I'm a sound engineer in Barcelona (Spain), doing my job at an audio for video studio.

Besides my work as a technician, I also dedicate my time to teaching for many years. I have always stressed to my students and colleagues in the importance of two factors: noise and dynamic. At present, this results in noise (and quantization noise) and overcompressed dynamics. To these two factors, we must add the misuse that is given to data compressed audio files (mp3, aac, etc) in the professional arena where under no circumstances should be accepted, mainly due to the unknown post-process that will suffer . (Especially in the field of Broadcasting).


For the past several years, I’ve received many half - Playback's to be sung live at the TV Shows we produce. We have gone in just ten years from accepting work copies at 15ips, DAT tape, CD-Audio, WAV / AIFF, to the ubiquitous mp3 files ... and increasingly compressed over the time. ( I do not know why bought we peakmeters if they can not read more than +-0.5?)

Today I received an AIFF file at 44.1Khz/16bit from an American label. It was a perfect square wave. Unable to endure listening to more than 10 seconds.

In the studio we have a Spotify account. We have made a download of the same theme. As we all know, this company has to 320kbs files .... Even as data compression and presenting a soft fall from 16Khz: WOW ! We got dynamic and AIR… from a a F***d mp3!.

At the end I’m using the mp3 of Spotify.

The artists just want to act. The manager just want to place their artists and care little about what we tell the engineers. Music companies want their music just sounds louder and not usually listen to the engineers and producers who have been hired to create their discs.

In many cases even go unheard councils of producers, and managers, secretaries, clerks and other non-qualified personnel is dedicated to making overcompressed copies and data compressed to send to broadcasters rather they do the sound engineers..

What would be a minimal cost to the overall production of a record!

... and people, we're talking about major record label with great artists and good producers and engineers

Too bad.


Hermes Serrano

[jNive]

Many thanks for posting your industry experience - it happens too often that the issue of 'quality' no longer holds any importance with labels, producers or consumers. Ironically, the people that usually care about quality have the least power in the commercial mass-market - artists (as they are bound by contract and often hand over final say & direction to management & labels), engineers (hired by the labels, and can only say so much before talking to a brick wall) - and "audiophiles" (now considered a 'minor' listening group so are not important in broad-based marketing decisions).

As long as labels view the relative importance of certain audio elements (loudness, length, distortions, dynamics etc) as being minor in their contribution to sales, then they can be 'sacrificed' as the trade-off off in the more important one - loudness -v- dynamics, lenght -v- airplay) - and hence the now highly formulaic approach to music from an industry that has lost all it's imagination or creativity, as they are 'scared' to not make as much money as possible so to speak.

3-4 minutes length
-4 to -8db Average RMS (Loud)
Major hook for choruses, and repeated at least 4 times in the song, with a back-to-back repeat towards the end (or a faster/harder beat)

and so on and so on....

And then they blame ANY loss in sales on piracy!!!!