Some YouTube users are mounting a growing revolt against the site's new audio scheme, which has degraded the sound quality of clips on the site by running them through an audio processor that wreaks havoc with songs' dynamic range (the variation between loud and soft), diminishing their sound quality.
This is not “compression" as in bit rate or file format, but in the audio engineer sense of the word: the smushing together of various volumes into a smaller dynamic range. This sort of compression doesn't affect slickly-produced, radio-ready music quite as much, since it's already so compressed, but it hurts any music that has been properly produced, and does more damage to quieter, more nuanced recordings with lots of dynamic range.
Conspiracy-minded onlookers speculate that YouTube is trying to to degrade the sound quality of non-mainstream music on its site intentionally, but that seems doubtful. A more likely reason for this severe compression could be to try to smooth out the volume levels of various clips on the site, but the audio problems it has caused are nowhere near worth that added convenience.
Already, users are sharing an audio hack that solves the problem, to a certain extent. Sopranoguitar, who posted about the topic on Google's YouTube message boards, advises reducing the volume of an audio track before uploading so that its levels peak at -3 dB. Then, he recommends adding an inaudible high-frequency sine wave to artificially boost the volume of quiet passages into the -4 dB to -6 dB range. The lower volume dodges most of the compression effect, while the sine wave fools YouTube into thinking that the track is louder than it really is, so that it applies little or no new compression.
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