Is It Time for Radio to Restore Dynamic Range?

[ThaDood]

Well, if they are going to even attempt a better DR, dump the MP3 format! That would be one improvement.    https://www.radioworld.com/columns-and-views/guest-commentaries/is-it-time-for-radio-to-restore-dynamic-range

[redhat]

Being on the inside, I have seen a lot of good things over the last decade of engineering.  One thing, bought music libraries are often lossless.  Hard disk space is now cheap enough that lossless makes sense.  Of course, if your playing pop, hip-hip, or a lot of similar genres that makes use of samples, what are you really getting with lossless?  Program paths are often PCM, particularly in larger markets.  Smaller markets are often running analog STL shots, so little has changed there.  Processing has gotten better too.  Most of the new flagship processors incorporate declippers, and all you have to do is wait for a Red Hot Chili Peppers song to come on and see if its being used 

I read something recently about the loudness war being over, as many online streaming entities are pushing the volume of hypercompressed content down, seemingly rewarding material with dynamics by playing them louder.  I hope the trend continues, and I have seen some indy stuff lately that looks less like a box on the waveform view of any DAW.  Unfortunately the music distribution system is moving farther and farther from a lossless world, and often the only version you can get of a song is MP3.  At least bandcamp would let you have a PCM version of a song if you wanted, but again there is no way to tell what the original source was.

As long as people are content to listening to music on the subway with tin can ears, the music industry will pump out content geared toward the lowest common denominator.

+-RH

[Kingbear Radio]

I've always hated the loudness war, it's ruined some good music, just to be louder. Early it was said to be competition between mastering engineers to see who could be loudest, then loudness was used to be heard better on low dynamic range speakers in lots of products now.

I could see how hyper compressed songs would be played lower in a normalized streaming environment. MP3 Gain has been doing something like that for years in music collections. An RMS ALC would do something similar, holding the average level some db lower for hyper compressed as opposed to something more dynamic.

If you didn't limit, compress, and clip much after the ALC, that might help the sound be better on highly compressed tracks, they wouldn't ride so high into the "destructive" sections of the processing.