Quote:
Originally Posted by GlennD
(I do share the disdain for Beats headphones though. Even casual listeners can make a better sound choice....  ) |
LOL, Beats....
Do you know what "dynamic compression" and the "loudness war" is?
There has been an ongoing trend to make CD's louder and louder.
If I remember this correctly, the loudest a CD can become is 96 dB, and the default for the average loudness is 89 dB. So, if a piece of music equally goes up and down in loudness, a typical piece would run from 82 to 96 dB (average 89 dB), and have a dynamic range of 14 dB.
Now, if you raise the average, the CD obviously gets louder, but your dynamic range compresses. If you put the average at 92 dB, and you still want loud and soft parts to be equally distributed, you now only have 4 dB up and down, for a dynamic range of 8 dB.
With some tricks, CD's can be made to go up to 100 dB even. I've seen CD's hitting 100 dB and still have a dynamic range of only 5 or 6 dB. That means they average a huge 97 dB of loudness.
(PS: Those dB-levels are measured when a reference speaker system is set to a reference volume setting. This setting would yield 89 dB when playing a reference CD having a 89 dB reference test tone. After verifying that, you play the normal CD and measure how loud it is. Obviously you can lower the volume on your own device. The dynamic compression will still be there, of course.)
The problem is that louder and softer parts are closer and closer together (thus the term 'dynamic compression'). The bass will get dull, the drums loose power, and rhythm suffers.
Beats tries to remedy this with boosting things like bass, and the frequencies in which drums and such operates; so a heavily compressed piece sounds okayish on Beats headphones. Effectively, they try to uncrap crappily mastered music.
So, you get this situation.
I tell a colleague that his Beats headphones/earbuds are basically... not as good as he hoped, and he should look into other products. He disagrees, so I told him to listen to his music using my Shures. His conclusion was: your Shures are crap. All bass and drums are gone.
So I tell him: No, they're not gone. They were never there. You are now hearing the music as it was recorded. That music was badly recorded, and the Beats earbuds try to 'fix' it. They actually almost succeed making a right out of two wrongs.
'So YOU have music that is much better recorded, eh?', he sneers. I tell him yes, and let him listen to it on my player, with my Shures. He admits that the Shures have plenty of power behind the bass and drums and that the music sounds very good. (Although. it's not his genre; which I can understand. His genres are not mine either.)
After that, he wanted to hear that well recorded music on his Beats. I warned him not to do that. He still did, and the bass/drum boost of the Beats almost blew his head to smithereens.
So if your Beats headphones sound good, your music is probably recorded with huge dynamic compression.