They have murdered "Tears for Fears" ... digitally!

[Head_Unit]

There is one [Blu-ray] on Ebay, current bid is 101€ Piracy, it seems, is my only option.

Yeah but Putin has shut that down. 2000 copies, sold out before the pre-sale even finished. I got super super lucky. NO stereo track, probably due to $$$. I really don't understand how the economics could possibly work but glad they did.

Now seriously, these mixes are crap, where do we complain?

 

[Head_Unit]

I wonder if Tears for Fears could only afford to pay him for 2000 copies.

Sometimes Steven Wilson has not done stereo remixes because he feels the stereo mixes are fine in the first place and he has nothing to add. But why if there is a PRE-PAY presale doesn't SDE collect all those and THEN order? I posted that at SDE but no reply

 

[killdozzer]

@TheBatsEar Well, you got me interested, but I expected to see several angles. What interests me is why do consumers go for this? And why do people think that it's always fine to cater to the consumer in consumerist economy, but when it comes to loud digital files, all of a sudden sound engineers and producers should have the task of enlightening the masses and go against the popular vote?

Imagine yourself working in this industry releasing remasters that 5% of the market buy and your competition just makes them loud and cover the remaining 95%, how long do you think you's last? Do you think you'd enjoy the benefit of using the door after being fired or would it be the 15th floor window?

We can hate it (I do, for sure), but what do you recommend? How would you tackle it?

 

[Robin L]

We can hate it (I do, for sure), but what do you recommend? How would you tackle it?

EZ-Peazy---at least for me.

I know the heavily compressed stuff is heavily compressed for a reason, so I don't care if it is. I listen to many different types of music. A lot doesn't involve a speck of limiting and/or compression. And some is built upon the assumption that limiting and compression will be used, often to obvious excess. Artistic choices. So, if the artist chooses to have the music go out all compressed, limited, with a dynamic profile that looks like a buzztop on your desktop, that's their decision to make. If that artist is influenced by the boys in the front office, so mote it be. That's just the way it is. It's a business, after all.

 

[Pogre]

Stuff like this makes me want to shout and let it all out...

 

[TheBatsEar]

We can hate it (I do, for sure), but what do you recommend?

I'm just a dude that wants to enjoy the music, never thought about how to save the world, probably will never come up with something sensible anyway.

For me personally the solution is piracy. Piracy works. It has never let me down. None of my pirated tracks vanished suddenly from my playlist. The quality is superb. There is no DRM in pirated stuff. All the CDs, Cassettes, DVDs, LPs and Minidisks i bought? If i knew earlier how much better it is, i would have pirated them. I would download a car if i could.

And complaining. I complained at T4F. I complained at Concord. I complained at SDE. Didn't get any feedback.

As for the sound engineers, sucks to be a cog in the machine, i guess. Nobody asked me when i was replaced with a bunch of IT folk from india that works for less than a tenth of what i take. Sometimes you have to move on and make something better or different, if there is no money to be made in your old business.

 

[TheBatsEar]

Now seriously, these mixes are crap, where do we complain?

T4F, Concord and SDE at twitter or facebook?

 

[Sancus]

There really must be a 2.0 mixdown as part of the Dolby Atmos track, I would be shocked if there wasn't. But I'm not sure how to extract that part honestly.

If you *play* the Atmos track on BluRay itself using an AVR that only has a stereo configuration, what you should get is the stereo bed channels embedded in the mix, not an AVR-controlled downmix.

 

[TheBatsEar]

If you *play* the Atmos track on BluRay itself using an AVR that only has a stereo configuration, what you should get is the stereo bed channels embedded in the mix, not an AVR-controlled downmix.

Why? Atmos objects could just be placed at the right spot in the stereo downmix. Just tell the Atmos interpreter how much to mix of any object into left and right and Bobs your uncle.

If there is a tool on Linux that can tell me details about the Atmos track, i'm willing to try them.

 

[Sancus]

Why? Atmos objects could just be placed at the right spot in the stereo downmix. Just tell the Atmos interpreter how much to mix of any object into left and right and Bobs your uncle.

This could maybe work in theory, but it's not how Atmos backwards compatibility is implemented by every AVR/decoder that I know of. What happens is this:

1) Do you have at least 4.1.2 or 6.1 (center not required, but at least 6 channels seems to be)? OK -- then you get the Atmos object mix decoded for your system.
2) Otherwise, there is a DD+(streaming) or TrueHD(physical media) set of bed tracks embedded in the Atmos stream. For TrueHD, here is the typical breakdown of substreams(I don't know what it is for DD+JOC, exactly, but that's only used for streaming)

I think you should be able to get the pre-rendered 2.0 extension B "downmix" out. I don't know how though.

 

[NiagaraPete]

Great news.

 

[Sal1950]

Great news.

I knew the limited run couldn't stand, it was just dumb.
Leaving money on the table for a big name album like that, while tens of thousands of fans around the world are just going to steal it then anyway ???
I don't understand their thinking sometimes.

 

[TheBatsEar]

Great news.

Not for those fans that dropped 200€ or more in the last weeks.
Not for those that pirated their copy already.

It's 2022, why can't we produce these things on demand?
Amazon can print entire books on demand for 10€ shipped.

 

[charleski]

Imagine yourself working in this industry releasing remasters that 5% of the market buy and your competition just makes them loud and cover the remaining 95%, how long do you think you's last?

The problem is that this idea that increased loudness means increased sales is simply false, and was debunked over a decade ago. Consumers buy heavily-compressed music because that's the only way they can listen to their favourite bands, period. There's no point pretending that they have a choice when in fact no choice exists.

 

[killdozzer]

The problem is that this idea that increased loudness means increased sales is simply false, and was debunked over a decade ago. Consumers buy heavily-compressed music because that's the only way they can listen to their favourite bands, period. There's no point pretending that they have a choice when in fact no choice exists.

I don't agree. Whoever thinks no one likes loudness, but labels still insist on loudness in spite of everyone, will have the hardest job explaining how they envision things work in this world.

I'll save some room for that article to get debunked. If you want to test such claims, you can start by asking yourself why is volume leveling important in ABX of gear.

 

[charleski]

I don't agree. Whoever thinks no one likes loudness, but labels still insist on loudness in spite of everyone, will have the hardest job explaining how they envision things work in this world.

I'll save some room for that article to get debunked. If you want to test such claims, you can start by asking yourself why is volume leveling important in ABX of gear.

Please, repeating a myth doesn't make it true. Do you know of any evidence that compressing a recording to increase its loudness causes it to sell better? Note that the integrated loudness of a recording only has a loose correlation with the actual volume heard by the consumer, as this is under their control via the volume knob, so your ABX analogy is immaterial.

 

[Pogre]

Please, repeating a myth doesn't make it true. Do you know of any evidence that compressing a recording to increase its loudness causes it to sell better? Note that the integrated loudness of a recording only has a loose correlation with the actual volume heard by the consumer, as this is under their control via the volume knob, so your ABX analogy is immaterial.

I'm not sure where I fall on this, but it does make sense to me that most would prefer a compressed version of the same song if heard back to back on the same system with the volume dial in the same position. Not everyone understands that you can simply turn the volume up on the uncompressed version for the same perceived "clarity". It's like comparing amplification without level matching. If one is .5 dB louder it can easily be perceived as cleaner or clearer. They don't understand that it's a spl thing. All they know is "whoa, this one sounds better!".

I dunno, just playing devil's advocate. There is a reason everyone is doing it. What it is I don't know for sure, but I believe the above explanation has some plausibility.

 

[charleski]

I'm not sure where I fall on this, but it does make sense to me that most would prefer a compressed version of the same song if heard back to back on the same system with the volume dial in the same position. Not everyone understands that you can simply turn the volume up on the uncompressed version for the same perceived "clarity". It's like comparing amplification without level matching. If one is .5 dB louder it can easily be perceived as cleaner or clearer. They don't understand that it's a spl thing. All they know is "whoa, this one sounds better!".

I dunno, just playing devil's advocate. There is a reason everyone is doing it. What it is I don't know for sure, but I believe the above explanation has some plausibility.

We can speculate that this may be one of the sources of the myth: artists turned up the volume in the studio and said, 'Hey, this sounds better, make it sound like this!' Then they were given a compressed mix to listen to on their iPod and thought it sounded about as loud as they'd heard in the studio (though a lot crappier through their little earbuds) so jumped to the conclusion that compression was a magic way of gifting consumers with the performance you can get from five-figure speakers. Let's face it, these people aren't exactly waiting in line for a Nobel Prize.

 

[Sonic icons]

Is there a Nobel Prize for poll design?

 

[TheBatsEar]

Is there a Nobel Prize for poll design?

Not to toot my own horn, but feel there should be.