HiFi & Music & Review & Technical Wojtek on 09 Dec 2006 12:23 pm
A study on the “Loudness Wars”
My friend Robert Benson (he runs the www.collectingvinylrecords.com website), has sent me an interesting link yesterday.
It’s an article from the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, titled “Everything Louder Than Everything Else”. Here’s a short review:
It’s author, Joe Gross, makes a very elaborate study on modern record loudness levels and tries to answer the question as to how and why does today’s popular music can be exhausting to us, the listeners.
Joe touches the subject on both sides: from the music enthusiast’s and from the sound engineer’s (a.k.a. “the expert’s”) point of view.
Read on for some interesting excerpts from the mentioned article…
“(…) there are millions of copies of CDs being released that are physically exhausting listeners, most of whom probably don’t know why their ears and brains are feeling worn out.”
“For the past 10 or so years, artists and record companies have been increasing the overall loudness of pop and rock albums, using ever increasing degrees of compression during mastering, altering the properties of the music being recorded. Quiet sounds and loud sounds are now squashed together, decreasing the recording’s dynamic range, raising the average loudness as much as possible.”
“The idea is that louder recordings automatically sound better on low-quality reproduction systems, but this isn’t really true in practice. MP3 players such as iPods have their own compressors and limiters, further reducing the dynamic range of recordings, as do computers. A CD doesn’t have to be mastered loud; the iPod can make it as loud as everything else it plays.”
“(…) It is entirely possible that anyone younger than 18 reading this has no idea what we’re talking about. They may not bother to buy CDs anymore, such is the availability of MP3s single downloads. To them, popular music has always been hyper-compressed, square-wave stuff, able to punch through background noise with a single snare drum hit, clipping all over the place.
The article’s very long, but very well written and although it mentions things like: dynamics compression, sound clipping and RMS, you don’t need to be very familiar to all the technical knowledge beforehand, because the author explains it all rather nicely so that every reader can understand.
So, after saying that, click here to go and read the whole article.
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.