The Loudness issue has been on the "Limiter" end of the compression for 10 years now and there is still no distortion....
Ever have the tv on in the back ground and stop what your doing because for some reason, its been 10 seconds and there is no sound coming from the tv. You think something is wrong.....well no, everything is normal,...they are trying to get your attention, now they do it by having no sound for contrast!
I don't remember what publicity it was, but it illustrates where we are at.
Be it tv, cd, dvd, whatever popular format used, it has been pounded with dynamic range reduced content to the max, mix that with bumpers in and out of content that fight each other for attention, they can't rely on level now...they get creative.
Its true,this IPod culture is not helping at all, 99% of the content on a IPod is compressed to H#&L.....a big percentage of content would already be compressed and there is not much you can do, but I personally always preffered AIFF files on my IPod than any MP3/MP4 using chosen headphones.
This culture is already deaf come 24yrs old!! joke....but ya, they don't appreciate dynamic range!, they see it as, something is wrong with my headphones!
On the otherhand, the vinyl is silently guarding, preventing extinction...there is still an army of people who have a great analog system,great music available, they really care about dynamic range.
DVDAudio is also, but im sure there is more vinyl out there than DVDa.
Dvd in my opinion does not help because most folks have their systems set to handle the normal day to day rumble of radio/tv/videocassette/and even dvd that is compressed alot. So what happends is when they watch an actual film sitting down, they fuddle with the sound all the time because the system is not calibrated like it should. Oh and folks only try this a couple of times..after that, they don't bother!!!
Its like that, period. Thats the thing, profiting and enjoying great dynamic range and overall great sounding content, it takes a certain effort and knowledge on acoustics and things like that.So its not acsessible to everyone, most people don't want to bother with the "resposabilitys".
When the DVD craze came out, the record companies, seeing a new oportunity to make money, started "remastering" the old stuff, getting it ready for release.
Well we can safely say that the couple of years, all the products had been butchered!
They took sometimes glorious original analog mix/master and squeezed that into 16bit/44.1Khz. They did that with equipment that we don't use today!
Its like Formula one....the market evolved fast, nowadays, we have figured how to squeeze previous great analog audio onto still 16/44,1!
but it sounds ten times better.
Its a money thing, we can technically do seemingly imposible things to audio now, some at home, but the best is still a buisness...
One detail here, but its worth noting, I would be curious to hear from Classical, Jazz and Opera music buffs that have a hard time using an ipod and why they don't like it .
Cheers and Happy New Year everyone!:food-smiley-004: