All this is passing right over my head. Any possibility of dumbing it down a bit?
Even better if there are ways to evaluate DR in stereo set ups subjectively?
There is something known as Dynamic Range. It tells you the lowest level in your music and the highest level in your music sample. A good recording will have a wide difference between the lowest level and the hight leve. E.g. You are in a room where people have guitars, drums and they are singing. There is a nail lying on the table and it falls down. When no one is playing anything and the nail falls down, can you hear it?
If the room is noisy you will not be able to hear it. So to make you hear it, let's say I artifically amplify the sound of the nail hitting the floor. Now you will be able to hear it. But such a recording will sound artificial. You brain will immediately recognize it and your enjoyment will drastically reduce.
Now you are driving in a car and listening to a radio station. If the radio station is playing the recording faithfully, you will not be able to hear part of the broadcast where the volume is very low because of the car noise, engine noise, tyre noise, etc. So what the radio station does is that it artificially boosts passage in music with low volume and artificially turns down the volume of passages which are loud. This allows the guy in the car to hear all parts of the music. But it will sound artificial. The volume of vocals will be as loud as the drums and so on. This method of boosting low volume and reducing passages with high volume is dynamic compression. A tool can analyse and find the difference between sample of music with lowest volume and sample of music with highest volume. A good recording will show a good difference, but you will be able to hear and appreciate this music only with a good quiet room in a village with a good system. A compressed recording will show very little difference, but you will be able to hear this music in a noisy atmosphere and any noisy city like Bombay, Bangalore, Delhi.
Audiophiles are so fickle minded that they worry about brand of the equipment, rca connectors, cable risers, cables, mp3, flac, hi-res, bit perfect. But they forget that an even an MP3 with high dynamic range will beat a flac with low Dynamic range.
I can dumb down if you have one of the following
1. A macos box. Check this
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...alyzing-dynamic-range-of-music-library.35935/.
One important tool mentioned is
DR Offline MKII by MAAT.
2. A Linux box. Even a raspberry PI will do. You can simply install ebumeter. Once you install ebumeter, it will install an executable ebur128. You can use ebur128 on your music files to tell you the DR range in the music file.
This is valiid if you primarily listen to your local music collection instead of spotify, apple music, qobuz, tidal FLAC. If you are a streaming person you can't use any of the tools and you are at the mercy of the streaming provider.
You can go through these posts. It will clear lot of your doubts
Srajan Ebaen schools us on the nature of dynamic range and why it matters to people who care about sound quality.
darko.audio
Which is the best-sounding version of the classic Talking Heads album?
darko.audio
blog.landr.com
The presenter explains all the possibilities lucidly. I could not however understand the “LS” measure he refers to several times. Is it a loudness, clipping and compression metric?
