The Loudness War and Bad Sound

Have you ever noticed that the music you listen to today seems louder than the music you listened to ten or even twenty years ago? It's not an audio hallucination, it's a result of something called the loudness war. What's the loudness war? Well, in a nutshell, it's a ramping up of the sound level of the final mix of a recording. Once all the tracks have been recorded, the recording is passed on to the mastering engineer. It's at this stage where the overall sound of the recording is compressed and, at the same time, the dynamic range is reduced. In other words, the difference between the soft parts of the song and the louder parts becomes negligible. By squashing the dynamic range, it's possible to increase the volume to the point where something called "clipping" would normally occur (think of this as distortion and not the good kind), but because of compression the danger of clipping is reduced and the music can be mastered louder.

But dynamics are necessary to bring a piece of music to life. Dynamics allow the music to breathe and create space. Live performance, for example, has an incredible dynamic range. Think of a composition such as Haydn's Surprise Symphony. Without dynamics, the "surprise" in the Surprise Symphony wouldn't be much of a surprise at all. To put it another way, removing dynamics in music is like getting rid of all of the shades of colour. Can you imagine a world where there is one shade of green, one shade of blue, one shade of red? Not only that, all the colours are neon. Now, transfer that idea to music and you might get a clearer picture of the consequences of the loudness war.

The loudness war has been raging since the days of vinyl. Back then, no producer wanted their record to be the quietest one in the jukebox, so the output levels of the master mix would be increased. When CDs finally dominated the market, the loudness war really came to fruition. Known as "hot mastering" in the studio world, it has become commonplace for CDs released in the 00s to sound louder than those released in the 80s and 90s and, of course, much louder than a vinyl record. Oddly enough as well, the Great Unwashed grew to equate volume with quality. If it sounds louder, then it must be better.
 
To add insult to injury, the advent of portable music devices such as the Walkman in the 1980s and presently the iPod also contributed to the degrading sound. Have you noticed that sound quality is not a selling feature of the iPod, or any other MP3 player for that matter? The main selling feature is storage space, ironically not the quality of the sound. It's like advertising for a race car that doesn't mention how fast it goes. And when earbuds are brought into the picture, sound quality deteriorates even further. It's bad enough that the music is compressed, but then to put compressed music through substandard speakers (earbuds) and you're left with music that is a mere shell of its former self.

For the audiophile it's somewhat of a conundrum. Having high-end gear to play your music through is wonderful, but if the sound of the music has already been compromised, the highest-end gear will not make it sound better. So what's the point of the great gear? Certainly there are recordings out there that have a dynamic range that hasn't been cannibalized. You can find these in genres like classical, folk, and jazz. On the other hand, pop, rock, country, hip hop, R&B, and even contemporary blues have had the lifeblood sucked out of them. Now I'm not saying that music should not be played loud. Of course it should. Loud music with its dynamic range intact sounds exciting and powerful. In a lot of ways, it's how music should be listened to; however, reducing the dynamic range does a disservice not only to the artist but also to the listener. 

At one time, The Who had the dubious honour of being the loudest rock band in the world. Loudest in performance that is. The loudness war has made almost every artist the loudest in the world, loudest recordings instead of performance.

Personally, I'll take the loud performance. I'm tired of my CDs shouting at me.