Monday, October 16, 2006

The Loudness War

Ever get physically tired of listening to an album before it plays all the way through, even though you ostensibly like the band and its music? An ongoing trend in the digital remastering of pop music has placed pressure on sound engineers to increasingly compress the dynamic range, and thus make everything sound uniformly louder, as described in this article. I'd never heard of this practice, but it explains why TV commercials sound so loud, and could be a reason why many people espouse vinyl as sounding better than modern CDs. This escalation of compression has been termed the "loudness war."

5 Comments:

Blogger Bryan said...

This is a much better article than the one I originally posted about the loudness war and dynamic compression. It makes me not just question the quality of remastered pop recordings, but also the value of my 60 gigs of mp3s that let such a glaring trend in modern music production slide by without my previously noticing.

1:23 AM EST  
Blogger Bryan said...

Oops. Here it is: http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/imperfect-sound-forever.htm

1:25 AM EST  
Blogger Sweat of Ewing said...

It's definitely a real problem with most music, even by artists that supposedly know what they're doing. Billy Corgan might be a jerk, but he definitely knows his way around a studio. I remember when Zwan's one album came out he was quoted as saying, "I wanted to make the loudest fucking album possible. I wanted it to crush the listeners." But we have volume dials for a reason and he just compressed the shit out of it, so every guitar was indiscernible. Even though he had 3 great guitarists (Corgan, David Pajo, and Matt Sweeney), there was no way to hear anyone except for Billy Corgan. Which is probably what he secretly wanted because he's an egomaniac.

It always comes back to this for me, but listen to an Opeth album at some point. They're so perfectly mixed, because Steve Wilson from Porcupine Tree does the studio work for them and the guy is a genius. You can crank anything he does and totally immerse yourself in it.

2:26 PM EST  
Blogger Yoshi said...

For some reason, a lot of people have decided that louder is better in modern music. A lot of it is actually driven by listeners like teenage kids who think they can't enjoy their music unless it's blaringly loud. I don't have any evidence to support this other than my own experiences with people who listen to music at ridiculous volumes.

Personally, without dynamics, I find music can get a bit boring.

10:48 PM EST  
Blogger Unknown said...

The only thing I would add from my experience is that dynamic compression is a regular practice in public radio, used with care. "Compression" is actually a misnomer - what it does, really, is normalize volumetric outliers - so not only are quieter sounds amped up, but loud sounds are quieted down.

Compression itself is not the enemy of the audiophile - used with enough precision, it can make a voice sound more life-like, and less like it was recorded in a studio (which has padded walls in order to prevent natural resonance - often pre-compressed trackings sound flat). The stylus author noted well that sound gets compressed anyway in the broadcast process - so any compression I do in studio is compounded by broadcast compression.

When dealing with music, which spans a pitch range that far exceeds the colors of a human voice - there are far more atrocious practices that compromise fidelity for "aesthetics." There are dynamic equalizers, pitch filters, pop removers, saliva removers, breath deletions, and artificial vibratos cosmetically engineered into a voice, that are virtually undetectable to 99.9% of the population. It is an unsung art in itself -- not only cleaning a sound, but rounding and polishing it off, sometimes to a fault. But for all it's worth to this conversation, I don't apologize for any of these practices. I remove these imperfections in my daily work, because I believe they distract from the content and clarity of someone's message.

9:23 PM EST  

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