The Loudness War
 

I'm trying to spread some info about the ongoing war in music to produce loud masters. Here's my views on the matter, would love to know yours:

The loudness war
So what is the loudness war? Well it refers to the ongoing competition between record labels and artists to have the loudest sounding record out there, often at the expense of sound quality. Have you ever noticed that when playing old records you sometimes have to turn the volume up to get the same apparent loudness as a modern commercial track? This is down to the way the track has been mastered. In the digital world the peak of a waveform can never exceed 0dbfs. But by using techniques such as heavy compression and limiting the waveform can be squashed and then turned up, so the average level (RMS) is higher. Also EQing techniques to give certain frequencies more weight can make things appear louder, see Fletcher Munson Curve.

When your volume knob is set at the same level, tracks which have been mastered this way will appear much louder. However, on many tracks this will have a negative effect on the sound and feel of a track. Most of the dynamic range is lost, meaning no punch, no body, no impact on the chorus, and often tracks which have been severely over compressed suffer from nasty distortion, not the nice warm fuzzy stuff we all like, but brittle digital crackles which make your CD playter sound like it's broken. Tracks often sound flat and lifeless, and if levels are matched they actually sound weaker and quieter than less compressed material. Think of a rock track; when you turn it up you want the snare to thump you in the chest, you want to be able to feel the music. A wall of sound will not give this effect, it will just cause your ears to start fatigueing and essentially stop you from enjoying the music. Some people are forgetting that pretty much all music systems have a volume knob, and its there for a reason. Yes, consistency is needed between tracks on a record, but not the kind of consistency we're seeing these days.

A lot of people are also under the misconception that over compression will make things sound more upfront and loud on the radio, which is largely not true. Each radio station has its own set of processers, which gives different stations different sounds. If you take a look at a waveform lifted from a radio station, you can see there isn't much dynamic range: Radio Aire and We Run Riot. This is understandable as radios are often played in places where there is a lot of background noise. However, most overcompressed tracks will actually sound weaker when played along something more dynamic, even without touching the volume knob. Radio processing tends to deal with more dynamic material much better. Try comparing a well mixed song from the 80's to something more recent which has been a victim of the loudness war, and you will be surprised at how much bigger and mroe open it will sound.

It's hard to see how this is going to end. If all music systems were fixed with some kind of apparent loudness matching algorhythm (like iTunes) this might help. However it would then be likely that people would just try and find a way to beat this algorhythm to get their track to sound louder. I personally think the key is education. Every time somebody comes to me and asks for somethign as loud as possible, I explain to them how it will affect their music. I think it's every mastering engineer's responsibility to do this, although at the end of the day we do provide a service and must eventually do as instructed by the client. [advertising removed by mod]

To the everyday consumer of music it's easy to see why something which sounds loud can initially impress, but to those of us who listen more closely to the music it is obvious how this pointless exercise is damaging modern music. With a little explanation, I'm pretty sure the everyday consumer would agree. So spread the word and bring back dynamic music!!

^^^Is there some relevance to this?

Have you heard it? It's infamously LOUD.

It's an odd argument though, as a musician myself I wouldn't think of telling a producer to make everything louder. I'd leave that up to the listener. Sounds like macho willy waving.

I remember a couple of years ago Metallica got huge criticism for doing this on their album.

Yes, it is an infamously loud record, but being released in 1973 before the great compression battles really got started, the loudness that the listener perceives is a result of the producer (Iggy Pop himself) pushing the overall track levels to the point of clipping the signal, and not the result of the album being mastered with a huge amount of compression, which is what the OP is talking about in his original post.

In the case of Loudness Wars, which is really a compression war, the resulting loudness is usually not from any sort creative decision or input from the musicians themselves who are creating the music , but a marketing technique used by record companies so that an album or song gets noticed or stays at the forefront of a listener's attention.

The album I've noticed this the most is, strangely, St. Elsewhere by Gnarles Barkley. It makes it sound like total shit on headphones.

Yes, for Death Magnetic, which was the contemporary example I was going to give for an album that pushed the boundaries of compression in the mastering process and thus backfired, resulting in an album that was barely listenable.

I think this gif illustrates it best.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...-something.gif

Dynamics are a very important part of music to me, so I find it a real shame that this marketing tactic is so widespread.

I'm not clued up on the technical side of production, mastering etc. and wasn't really aware of this. So record companies actually do this to gain listeners attention? Seems like really dumb logic on their part.

Yes, this is something that record companies do very consistently and It's been a steady and increasing progression since the late 70's, but the original post of this thread does a far better job of explaining it than I ever could.

Again, it's all in the GIF.

Yeah, that GIF really does illustrate the evolution within the recording industry over the course of the past 25+ years of the overuse and abuse of dynamic compression becoming becoming the default standard in producing albums. I don't think it's anything we're going to get away from anytime soon.

I remember getting Death Magnetic the day it was released. When i brought it home and listened to it the first thing i noticed was the sound quality. On headphones the album can be very painful to listen to and some parts of the album sound a bit distorted. They remastered and re-released the album a few months afterwards i think and the sound is meant to be a lot quieter and clearer.

The best example of a 'loud' album that i've come across is The Woods by Sleater-Kinney. At first i thought i'd downloaded a bad rip because the sound quality was so loud and distorted, but it turns out that the album sounds like that anyways. The album gain is roughly around -13.05 dB which is ridiculously loud for a studio album. The album was produced by a certain Dave Fridmann, who was also responsible for ensuring that The Flaming Lips' At War With The Mystics album was just as loud.

Well I've learnt something today. It's funny, I've always accepted that cds I've got from recent years are likely to be louder than one from, say, the 80s, but I never put any thought into why that may be.

Admittedly there's not many albums I like, that I can think of, that have suffered from this. But then maybe that's why I like them? :confused::confused:

i'm actually okay with some loudness, but when something is so overcompressed that there's absolutely no dynamics (the waveform is literally a block) it doesn't sound good. or when i download an mp3 to itunes sometimes people have the "volume adjustment" messed with usually all the way up. volume adjustment is only to make sure that audio can be heard at a respectable level with the rest of your music not to kill ear drums.

This is limited so badly that I decided not to buy the album.
Gives me a ****ing headache.

Ozzy's new CD is ridiculously loud and sounds like crap because of the loudness war.

I absolutely hate the loudness war, which is why I'm trying to stick to original CDs and stay away from remasters because the remasters also compress and brickwall everything.

Link/source? That album has never been remastered or reissued to my knowledge, ever.

Wow, wow, not good remasters.
MFSL remasters almost always sound a lot better than the original.
And then there's the original dire straits CD's, they sound completely crappy. There's the remasters that appeared in the half/late nineties, they sound almost as good as the vinyl records. And that's a compliment :D.

It depends on what label remasters the album and who the mastering engineer is.

Jon Astley = bad
Vic Anesini = excellent

There are excellent remasters out there and there are terrible ones out there.

Absolutely. Most of the time the original release is better.
But there are some very, very good remasters out there.

I just can't stand how everyone seems to think those new Beatles remasters are brilliant.
Yes, they are pretty good. But has no one realised that, after tons of Beatles remasters, this is the first time they actually made one that comes close to the original masters? They WERE good. Especially the later beatles recordings are really really good sounding. Just buy the old friggin' records people :D.

One of the things that I think is so sad is that so many people think newer technology is better. The best recording quality ever achieved was in the seventies. Whenever they 'remaster' those precious recordings they just straight destroy them. Rhino has absolutely butchered the Ramones' catalog. And for new artists it's also sad. I mean, how pathetic is it to think 'I'm gonna get that little edge by being a touch louder so more people will notice me'? I'm especially disappointed to see the Flaming Lips playing that game.

I think there has been no improvement in recording quality since the fifties.
Listen to old brubeck and davis recordings, listen to old classical recordings.
They sound just brilliant. And I don't mean warmer or some crap like that, I mean crisp, transparent, clear, just like modern day recordings.
I do admit that making quality recordings has become a lot more convenient with digital media, but people tend to abuse digital audio. There's a sort of "You can do whatever you want, it's digital" mentality.
Thing is, slight tape distortion and compression or tube distortion isn't such a bad thing. Yes it's a pity when a recording gets distorted, but it's still enjoyable. Whereas digital distortion or compression sounds just awful. There's no headroom at all.

The best recordings I know are all done analog.
I have a tape of Brubecks "Jazz impressions of eurasia" on my tapedeck right now.
I made a copy from a friends' Record as I'm still searching for it myself (I found this one for him, now that he's got it I want it too ;D) and it sounds incredibly good. 1958 and it's pure audiophile quality.

Amen.

Find the recordings conducted by Hermann Scherchen that have not been digitally remastered (in other words, on vinyl)

Amazon.com: Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 In E Flat Major, Op 55 180g 33RPM LP: Hermann Scherchen: Music

Yes Sir!