Hi, and thanks for reading this. I have been learning the art of Mastering for a few months now and have a fair hold on it I think. Of course, like most people in this position, I can not get my projects as loud as the loudest loud that's out there. I know that they (the major studios) have a lot more money than I do and can afford the best gear available. I understand that the expensive gear has much better digital converters and that this ultimately adds up, in part, to the louder song that they produce.
Now, what I have done so far is only slightly under the overall volume levels of the professionals who work for the Major labels. The overall clarity of my stuff is not as rich and clear as the Pros.
But, here's the strange thing: My listeners prefer the louder, peaking songs of mine over the lower volume non-clipping songs, I have explained to them that the louder song is not the right way to do it and then try to point out why it isn't. Regardless, they still want to hear the clipping, peaking songs over the non-clipping peaking songs.
You may be asking who these listeners are. They are just your regular fans who have almost no knowledge of clipping, distortion, peaking and so on.
You may be asking what type of music this is. It is a heavy Slipknot/Rob Zombie/Ministry-type sound.
So, now that you know this, I'm asking those of you who know or think you know from experience, is it ever okay to clip a lot or even a little in your opinion?
And, do you know or believe that any of the commercially successful hard rock or metal bands out there (who record and try to sell), do, in fact, intentionally allow clipping on their Master in order to obtain more overall end volume?
I am really curious about this answer and what you all think. I hope some of you answer this with your industry or otherwise wisdom.
 
Thanks,
 
bob
  

Hey Bob.
Sounds as though you are having some fun there:)
In digital recording you should never push anything into clipping - ever. There are ways to get that fat, saturated, distorted sound that your fans like that will sound much better. I am sure some of the folks here will have some ideas - your genre of music is not really my area.
 
Bruce.
 

bobernaut
 
[...] The overall clarity of my stuff is not as rich and clear as the Pros. [...]

To be honest, this is where the focus should lie. The end listener typically has access to a volume knob and will often make the decision to turn something up or down - clarity will allow them to choose from either without issue (to them).
 
The only time I ever walked out of the local pub (also a family restaurant) without even ordering was due to the owner allowing a band to use sound levels way beyond any norm. When he asked me on the way out why I was leaving, I simply said, "Even the best music on the planet can be loud enough to be obnoxious." The only "volume knob" I had access to was to leave.
 
Commercials are the common one that violate this, so please bear in mind that "loud" never equates to "better."
 
Also bear in mind that compressors are becoming more common with streaming media, so the playback medium could easily squash the dynamic range dramatically on you (as well as lower your volume).

Are they listening to the songs volume matched

sausy1981
Are they listening to the songs volume matched

very important if you compare mastered tracks: you gotta match the volume for A/B comparison otherwise it is very misleading ...
 
if you overdo the loudness thing, the production will suffer, irrespective of the genre ... you push it too far, it gets crappy ...
 
<< for the record: I'm not a mastering engineer myself / I have heard quite a few PRO productions that were spoilt by making the master too loud / when we send rock tunes to mastering we explicitly ask not to make it too loud >>

It's not to do with peak loudness. Nor are the convertor chips in expensive interfaces necessarily any better than the chips in the less expensive ones, often they're the same. The biggest difference lies in the supporting circuitry.

As for loudness, humans perceive loudness primarily from how loud something is on average. Which means in audio terms we pay more attention to the RMS level than the peak level. Very short transients, such as the initial transient from a snare drum or banjo, can be incredibly loud, loud enough to be almost painful if sustained, yet be ignored by our ear/brain combination.

Lower actual volume, but sustained, tends to sound much louder. For example, a guitar distortion pedal or fuzz can sound incredibly loud compared to the "clean" sound when the pedal"s off. But when measured the distorted sound can be actually much quieter than the clean peaks. Guitarists sometimes find this out the hard way when they stomp on an overdrive, which sounds massively loud, only to have their solo disappear because the volume has actually dropped.

So making something sound louder is more to do with raising the RMS level compared to the peak volume than anything else. This is done by the, hopefully careful, use of compressors and limiters.

We also tend to perceive certain kinds of (slight) distortion as more musical than no distortion.

As for clipping, there are two kinds. One is the analogue kind, which can be emulated (though not always perfectly) in software, where the waveform starts to get compress with the extremes chopped off. Guitar amplifiers and distortion-based effects are the classic example. The other kind is where a digital circuit is overloaded and runs out of ones and zeros to represent the sound. At that point you get a very loud, very nasty noise with no musical content at all.

There are plenty of examples of music (and advertisements that are much louder than the TV programme) that's limited to the point where the waveform looks like a rectangular brick, with very little in the way of dynamics. It's actually quite hard to listen to for any length of time because it's tiring. The lack of dynamics can also give the impression it's quieter than it actually is once our hearing has shifted to accomodate the volume.

And as has been said, the only way to compare two different masters is to ensure they are listened to at the same volume. Until our hearing "shifts" we tend to prefer the louder track. Demonstrating that a more expensive system is "better" by raising it's volume slightly compared to a "not as good" system is an old hi-fi showroom sales trick.

Yea, it is very hard to match levels for a listen-off.  And it is hard to match pro levels since they:
 
Have flat tracking rooms with no pronounced buildup of frequencies which show up later.
 
High end hardware can absorb not just high energy but the transients while transformers and tubes help round/flatten transients out.  Even w/o T&T, high end stuff doesn't distort so much as saturate and has a lot more control before finally distorting (unpleasantly).  So it sounds more like what we hear from professional sources.  A fifty dollar per channel preamp/converter sounds great most of the time, unless overstressed.  At the top end of its gain and with incoming loud sources, however, it doesn't stay quite as smooth.
 
Then, before mixing, export every track to a stereo editor like Sound Forge and scroll through the track.  Any time you find a peak a couple of dBs above average, excise it w/ the eraser tool.  Suddenly the track has + 2-3 dB more headroom, which you can quickly excise too using normalization, compression and limiting.  Then you should have a nice block of sound to put back into the project.
 
Then master those until there is nothing left but a block.
 
It still probably won't match a commercial product (esp. any of the loud metal ones) but you should be much closer.  Then raise the volume of your song up until your audience thinks yours sounds better and see how far you still have to go. 
 
 
@

To answer the original question, yes, the pros sometimes do use clippers to squeeze every last dB of volume out of a mix. Most would prefer not to, if it was up to them.
 
Bear in mind that the volume-war trend is reversing. Pushing your volume to the absolute max will likely make your productions sound dated in a few years, like diving sinewave toms and gated-reverb snares from the 80's.

I'm pretty sure that Metallica's Death Magnetic has clipping all over the place. Not sure if it was intentional or not, and I think they went much too far with it, but yes, clipping is done. There are ways to make it less damaging to the audio - only clipping drum hits, using a soft clipper to avoid harsh aliasing. I routinely use a clipper on my drum track and have in the past used a soft clipper on the master to get a little extra headroom, though I'd probably avoid the latter these days since a decent limiter will do much the same job.
 
There are other techniques for increasing perceived loudness you should push to the limit (pun semi-intended) before you bring out the clipper - automate stray loud parts down a little, compress individual tracks, multi-band compress the master, throw in a limiter, consider saturation, high and low pass to remove inaudible energy to give yourself even more headroom, etc.
 
I don't think there's much point trying to tell people they're 'wrong' for preferring the overcompressed and loud versions. They like loud music generally, they want songs to be roughly as loud as each other when played on shuffle, and they don't want quiet sections in those loud songs to be inaudible over the sound of traffic when listening on headphones outdoors. And a little extra distortion on the track is not going to upset someone who is a fan of music that is heavily based around distortion in the first place.
 
 

Hi. The "loudness war" is hopefully coming to an end.
The (perceived) loudness (I believe) is more of a pause in sound, than a consistent sound.
The loudest songs I have ever heard, has been the ones with the biggest (volume) range. It all depends on the volume knob...