The BBC article is spot on. For me the highlights are crowd noise, locale-based SPL limits and audience expectations.
The first 2 are hand-in-glove linked - people screaming and yelling and having full voice conversations whilst the performance is going on. The amount of noise local to an individual can easily be louder than the PA system 150 ft away (inverse square law); audiences have gotten much ruder in the last 20 years. I remember when audiences would whisper during a Bob Dylan concert, now it's a free for all. Local SPL limits mean this: the *show*, either in the form of the tour itself or the promoter is fined when SPL from the show exceeds stated limits. The police don't go after the audience because any ONE individual isn't capable of exceeding the limit but en mass they are. So the promoter or band management has to pay the fine at settlement (deducted from proceeds) if the Mixerperson turns it up to get over the audience. My boss spent 25 years mixing an international act "very popular with the 'scooter crowd'" and at one stop in northern California the SPL limit was only a couple of dB greater than the band's stage SPL. The band leader told my boss "do the regular show, that's what our fans expect." The group played the show and received only a couple hundred dollars (instead of thousands) after the fines were deducted (some magic carpet ride). Perhaps in the UK the authorities will arrest the soundman or the band, but either way it represents a compromise to the audience.
Audience expectations - a source in the article mentions ear buds and that means the audience "knows how it's supposed to sound" but I think there is little that could be further from the truth. The versions of music distributed by Apple, Google, Amazon, and presumably the streaming services as well, have 'remastered' the audio with multiband compressors to "maker everything louder than everything else." There is very little dynamic range because the loose fitting ear buds are too leaky - the result is that lower level audio is masked by ambient noise around the listener. Ditto for tonal EQ; it's been bass-enhanced because of the poor seal between the earbud and the ear canal. The result is that audience members THINK they know how something is supposed to sound, but even if they have well fitted ear buds, what they are hearing bears only a passing resemblance to what the artists and producer heard when the tracks were originally mastered. The iTunes and Google Music customers, the Amazon subscribers, the Pandora/Spotify listeners complained loudly and since these tech giants have no musical soul they consider tonal modification and extreme "normalization" to being good customer service, while it's a disservice to the performance and production of the original... but the casual listeners frankly don't care about that so from a commercial perspective, the content providers are right.
Finally there's the issue with putting on shows in sporting venues. As pointed out in the article stadia and arenas are designer to transmit and reflect sound as part of the fan experience. The multiple reflections and RT60 times are pretty much the antithesis of what is needed for amplified music but nobody is building 50k-80k capacity venues for live music, so what to do... As Frank Zappa said when opening a Mothers of Invention show with the LA Philharmonic "When you make music in a room designed for hockey, you take your chances. Hit it, Zuben!"
The first 2 are hand-in-glove linked - people screaming and yelling and having full voice conversations whilst the performance is going on. The amount of noise local to an individual can easily be louder than the PA system 150 ft away (inverse square law); audiences have gotten much ruder in the last 20 years. I remember when audiences would whisper during a Bob Dylan concert, now it's a free for all. Local SPL limits mean this: the *show*, either in the form of the tour itself or the promoter is fined when SPL from the show exceeds stated limits. The police don't go after the audience because any ONE individual isn't capable of exceeding the limit but en mass they are. So the promoter or band management has to pay the fine at settlement (deducted from proceeds) if the Mixerperson turns it up to get over the audience. My boss spent 25 years mixing an international act "very popular with the 'scooter crowd'" and at one stop in northern California the SPL limit was only a couple of dB greater than the band's stage SPL. The band leader told my boss "do the regular show, that's what our fans expect." The group played the show and received only a couple hundred dollars (instead of thousands) after the fines were deducted (some magic carpet ride). Perhaps in the UK the authorities will arrest the soundman or the band, but either way it represents a compromise to the audience.
Audience expectations - a source in the article mentions ear buds and that means the audience "knows how it's supposed to sound" but I think there is little that could be further from the truth. The versions of music distributed by Apple, Google, Amazon, and presumably the streaming services as well, have 'remastered' the audio with multiband compressors to "maker everything louder than everything else." There is very little dynamic range because the loose fitting ear buds are too leaky - the result is that lower level audio is masked by ambient noise around the listener. Ditto for tonal EQ; it's been bass-enhanced because of the poor seal between the earbud and the ear canal. The result is that audience members THINK they know how something is supposed to sound, but even if they have well fitted ear buds, what they are hearing bears only a passing resemblance to what the artists and producer heard when the tracks were originally mastered. The iTunes and Google Music customers, the Amazon subscribers, the Pandora/Spotify listeners complained loudly and since these tech giants have no musical soul they consider tonal modification and extreme "normalization" to being good customer service, while it's a disservice to the performance and production of the original... but the casual listeners frankly don't care about that so from a commercial perspective, the content providers are right.
Finally there's the issue with putting on shows in sporting venues. As pointed out in the article stadia and arenas are designer to transmit and reflect sound as part of the fan experience. The multiple reflections and RT60 times are pretty much the antithesis of what is needed for amplified music but nobody is building 50k-80k capacity venues for live music, so what to do... As Frank Zappa said when opening a Mothers of Invention show with the LA Philharmonic "When you make music in a room designed for hockey, you take your chances. Hit it, Zuben!"
