Loudness Wars
Well, it’s been a few years since I visited this topic, so here we go. I posted this at HN, and since people liked it there, here it is in a slightly edited form:
The loudness wars are the primary enemy of quality sound reproduction in most (not all) music recordings today.
This is about radio.
As you sit in your car, tune your radio to your local Top 40 station. You’ll notice that, even when you turn down the dial to the lowest audible setting, you perceive a constant drone of music/noise (depending on how you feel about pop music). Now, tune to the local classical station. Little spurts of noise can be heard, punctuated by… quiet spots. The average consumer thinks: “What’s wrong with this music?! I have to turn up and turn down my volume all the time!” Connoisseurs of classical music, however, encourage dealing with this high dynamic range, because dynamics are a critical part of classical music.
Here’s the sad part: POP MUSIC DOESN’T NEED TO HAVE ITS DYNAMIC RANGE SMASHED! Doing so makes the music less interesting… it’s just at one level of loudness for the whole song, for the whole album, for every single artist that’s been popular over the past decade. Thing is, radio stations can easily take high dynamic range (big differences between the loud and soft parts) source material and run it through a compressor to limit the dynamic range, thus making their music more car compatible (solving the classical music ‘problem’). However, consumers expect to hear the same when they download an AAC/MP3 and play it outside their car. “What’s wrong with this old recording, it’s so quiet”, is a common complaint. Of course, when iTunes (and competing software) have features like automatic output leveling (Sound Check), compressing dynamic range at OUTPUT and not at MASTERING should be the choice producers make.
Yet, the industry persists, making the music louder at the expense of eliminating its dynamic range. They’re painting soundscape with a more limited palette (though, doing a surprisingly effective job, given the limitations).
No one knows, no one cares, yet our musical experiences suffer.