i'm having a problem with digital brick wall mastering


sam here and my problem is simple? all the digital albums that i download have a lot of brick wall mastering applied and it make the audio sound distorted and lifeless? i was able to find an allpass filter that removed the brick wall mastering however for some unknown reason after the brick wall mastering was removed the dynamic range is now too high on average 8db increase and i have to reduce the digital volume to prevent clipping. also now the audio sounds to analog like with all the digital sound gone? it’s like vintage vinyl on steroids? is there a filter that can remove only half of the brick wall mastering. all my digital audio now sounds like a live studio performance?
guitarsam
Hey Sam,

I’m not sure what you mean about brick wall mastering. There’s no way to restore data that has been removed, but ...there is upsampling and oversampling, as well as different types of filters used by the DACs, some with slower rolloff. Maybe this is what you mean by brick wall?

If you used some sort of digital conversion like ffmpeg, or sox (on Linux) to upsample you may have gotten some level shifting as a result.

I encourage you to learn to use either of them, they re like swiss army knives for altering digital music files.

Best,

E



i'm talking about the loudness wars and audio distortion and the audio waveform looks like a 2 x 4 and then after using the iir allpass filter with foobar2000 set at default with volume increase at zero so all i'm doing is running the audio through the filter without changing the settings and now instead of the waveform looking like a 2 x 4 it has large peaks and all the distortion is gone?