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  • EADD Moderators: Pissed_and_messed | Shinji Ikari

The EADD Windows Technical Gibberings Thread

that's because commercial recordings and film soundtracks are usually mastered with quite a lot of care, but then when someone rips it to mp3 or whatever, they can screw it up easily, using lower sample rates in encoded film audio has the effect of reducing the overall available headroom for loudness too.

basically every sound engineer has their own way of dealing with this and some are better than others at it, or have different ideas of what is right, so there is a lot of variation in original recordings from different sources.
 
Ben So Furry said:
Ceres I use an audio program that checks the waveform if I perform normalisation on it, it boosts the quiet bits to 0db (you can set it to other values like -2 if you need too) it doesn't touch the volume levels or peaks or pops that are already at the predetermined level. Unless the pops or hits are above the level predetermined. It then reduces the volume of these sections. It does not cut off the peak of the waveform. It just reduces the volume level. The entire track becomes a completely flat waveform at a set level, say -2db.
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thats because your literally cutting off the signal and causing clipping, normalisation preserves the shape of peaks without harsh clipping.

800px-Clipping_compared_to_limiting.svg.png
 
The other thing that springs to mind is surround sound. I used to wonder wtf was going on when I couldn't hear the speech in films but the music was booming. Then I realised the audio was in surround sound and needed to be downmixed to two channels.

I would be surprised if Windows 7 does not deal with that properly though.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war is worth reading.

I forgot to point out aswell that laptop speakers make the problem worse, because they don't reproduce lower frequencies as well as larger speakers, and lower frequencies use up more headroom and can be quite a significant part of the overall perceived loudness.
 
Would it help settle this if rickolasnice use a piece of software to report the loudness of two of their differing media files?

I just loaded two audio files into Audacity, they clearly have different peaks.

DIXQ7F2.png
 
In that case, there is headroom in the lower track to increase the loudness via normalisation. BUT if the track had a louder section in it (greater dynamic range) like this :

eA3AGKS.png


Then the track can't be made any louder, unless that peak is shrunk with a limiter, or clipped off (resulting in distortion, but this is what cheap processors do).
 
Yes, I'm in full agreement with you :) I just think we do not have enough information about rickola's case to decide what the problem is, and if/how it can be tackled. But maybe rickola does now.
 
The problem really is that every piece of audio is different, some are produced better than others, some deilberately sacrifice dynamic range for the sake of loudness (pop music etc), some deliberately maintain a lot of dynamic range because it is important to the drama of the piece (classic music, orchestral stuff, movie soundtracks).

So the recordings themselves are the issue rather than anything to do with the laptop soundcard, although laptop speakers do make it more apparent.
 
Ceres I'm in full agreement with you. This is really fascinating. Thanks for taking the time to post those visual images. To pick up on a few points you have made without fully quoting every post making this one very large.

Ceres said:
although laptop speakers do make it more apparent.
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Yes laptop speakers well all the ones I have used are toss. Even the headphone out is horrible and has so much electrical hiss it's insane. Even using decent earphones, actually the good earphones highlights the problem even more.

Then the track can't be made any louder, unless that peak is shrunk with a limiter, or clipped off (resulting in distortion, but this is what cheap processors do).
Click to expand...

That's exactly what this piece of software does to a waveform. Explained it down to a tee. It will first limit the peaks then raise the entire waveform to the predetermined level. I'm sorry if I misunderstood the correct term for normalisation. This is what I regard to be its use. I know what clipping sounds like and it doesn't clip any of the peaks I assure you.

knock said:
So they should get an amp and decent speakers.
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Yes they should. Agreed. I need some decent headphones, Ceres any suggestions? Lol <3
 
A classic example of what I'm talking about is when a film is shown on tv with commercial breaks in it. The ads usually sound loud as hell compared to the audio in the movie, even though both have the same headroom to play with, this is because the audio in the ads has been limited really hard.
 
ben so fury said:
Yes they should. Agreed. I need some decent headphones, Ceres any suggestions? Lol
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I have beyerdynamic DT770 pro headphones, they are great, and not too painful to wear despite being closed-backs.

sennheiser make nice open backed headphones that are a bit cheaper and more comfortable to wear for long periods like watching a film. They will annoy anyone in the same room though as they leak al ot of sound.


People do mix their terms a lot when it comes to audio, it can get quite confusing. A limiter is really just a compressor, some people call them expanders aswell.
 
It's an Acer Aspire.. Onboard soundcard..

The problem isn't some bits being too quiet some being too loud.. it's obviously just certain films I'm streaming have the volume set really low for some reason.. I just thought that a simple piece of software which enables you to bypass your max volume setting on windows would be available :\
 
is it possible to simply plug 2 computers in, connect only one to a monitor, but connect both pcs together using USB ?

Will one pc then assume the master role and make the other one like an external hdd ?

Or, are there more complicated configuration type things that need doing too ?

thanks.
 
What are you actually wanting to do MDB,if you want to access2 machiens via one monitor / keyboard etc. and easy way would be to connect up one PC as normal and just use Remote Desktop when you want to access the other, just need a network connection on both.
 
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