Is most music now made for headphones

[fourfathom]

The main source of undesirable harmonic distortion in recordings nowadays is D/A clipping because it's driven too hard.

I assume you mean A/D clipping?  I have no inside info or other experience in that end of the recording industry, but this really surprises me because it is entirely unnecessary and indisputably leads to bad-sounding distortion.  It's unnecessary because the compression and soft-limiting techniques have become much better and easier than they were in the early days of digital music media.    People used to crank up the levels and let the tape's soft magnetic saturation do the limiting.  I'll bet there's a "tape saturation" digital effect that can be patched in.  Is this kind of overdriving (exceeding the A/D input range) still going on in the modern digital age?   The only way I can see that happening is through incompetence and stupidity.  Are there no "adults in the room"? 

BTW, obviously tape saturation does add distortion, but it's quasi-log (I'm guessing) saturation and not as harsh as the flat clipping you get with A/D overdrive.

[borjam]

The main source of undesirable harmonic distortion in recordings nowadays is D/A clipping because it's driven too hard.

I assume you mean A/D clipping?

No, D/A Imagine that you sample a sinusoid so that its peak reaches 0 dBFS.

Now, digitally, "amplify it" so that the peak would reach a higher level than 0 dBFS which, of course, you can't obtain with the D/A.

I have no inside info or other experience in that end of the recording industry, but this really surprises me because it is entirely unnecessary and indisputably leads to bad-sounding distortion.  It's unnecessary because the compression and soft-limiting techniques have become much better and easier than they were in the early days of digital music media.   

Of course! Bad sound! Listen to several recent pop songs and suffer

BTW, obviously tape saturation does add distortion, but it's quasi-log (I'm guessing) saturation and not as harsh as the flat clipping you get with A/D overdrive.

And it can be beautiful. There are digital emulations of tape distortion. There are also emulations of lots of old analog gear that distorted in a particularly good way adding some "life" (call it however you want) to sound.

But I'm talking about overdriving by adding too much gain and brick wall limiting in the digital domain.

[tooki]

I think you're experiencing the loudness war.

Nope. That's a completely separate issue. The loudness war takes away all the dynamics, and adds clipping distortion. That sounds just as bad, whether you use headphones or speakers.

Clipping is present only in worst cases.

Actually it’s present a LOT. Surprisingly, we don’t really hear minor clipping, so they just go wild and let it clip a bit. But severe clipping makes it out sometimes, too.

[SilverSolder]

Here are a couple of examples loaded into Audacity.  The top track is typical of newer recordings -  "maxed out" is pretty much the order of the day.  It isn't actually clipping, even though it looks like it....   it is just compressed to the absolute max.

The bottom track is a heavy rock number from the 70's...

[tooki]

Many analyses of modern CD releases have found actual clipping, where it doesn’t just look clipped, it is clipped.

[fourfathom]

Things are worse than I had imagined.  I can just picture the poor mastering engineer muttering under his breath "You want it even louder?  I'll give you louder, you stupid SOB!"

[mansaxel]

As the owner of a pair of JBL 4333, I am experiencing the same issues as you. With 15" Bass drivers it is perfectly clear when something was mastered on studio monitors or head phones.

Since my family forces me to watch the Eurovision Song Contest qualification rounds as well as the in-country and Euro finals, I've taken to devote myself to reviewing the LF sound quality of the backing tracks to the "karaoke with large light show" (As a former live sound engineer, I regard singback as a personal insult).

In the qualification rounds, it is obvious if a track has been done in a real control room (a studio room is rarely involved, except as backing voice booth. The proliferation of doing music that is emulating wood-and-hides instruments inside a computer is another personal insult, this time to my microphone cabinet) and what has been "monitored" on a pair of M-Audio toys in a bedroom.

This usually improves if a participant advances to the in-country finals, indicating that someone has been allocated funds to fix things up.

[SilverSolder]

Many analyses of modern CD releases have found actual clipping, where it doesn’t just look clipped, it is clipped.

They amp it up beyond clipping, then they run a "soft clip" algo on the track to round off the edges, so they can claim it isn't clipped! 

[Ed.Kloonk]

I never understood the rationale for not leaving headroom in a digital recording. All those jagged edges aren't very good for tweeters when driving them toward the limit.

[helius]

The loudness war began when pop singles began playing on radios and jukeboxes. When the gain is set at the same level (by necessity on a jukebox, or just by common laziness on the radio), a track that was recorded "hotter" will play louder and get relatively more attention. Pop music is the original "viral media" and getting attention is one of the goals since it translates into record sales and exposure. Pretty soon every artist wants their track recorded as "hot" as possible, to the maximum extent before the turntable needle jumps the groove.

Over time it just became a commonly accepted fact that you needed a loud record to succeed in pop music. The people driving it don't care about your tweeters; it's all careerism.

[mansaxel]

Many analyses of modern CD releases have found actual clipping, where it doesn’t just look clipped, it is clipped.

They amp it up beyond clipping, then they run a "soft clip" algo on the track to round off the edges, so they can claim it isn't clipped! 

When I worked in radio, we introduced a final processing box (yes, a loudness war machine) that has a function called "undo". It finds those waveforms that have been clipped -- however gracefully -- and restores them. The result is simply amazing. You get a clearer signal and still can get sensible level out to listeners.

[Ed.Kloonk]

Not much hope for good sound when a device like this flying turd exists..

[coppice]

The loudness war began when pop singles began playing on radios and jukeboxes.

Not really. Records predate radio or jukeboxes, and the day radios and jukeboxes appeared they were immediately playing the pop records of their day. People like Phil Spector, with his 1960s wall of sound production style, certainly lead to most of the dynamics disappearing from most pop music. However, the real loudness wars didn't get in gear until the 1990s.