The "Loudness War" and the Future of Music

An anonymous reader notes an article up at IEEE Spectrum outlining the history and dangers of the accelerating tendency of music producers to increase the loudness and reduce the dynamic range of CDs. "The loudness war, what many audiophiles refer to as an assault on music (and ears), has been an open secret of the recording industry for nearly the past two decades and has garnered more attention in recent years as CDs have pushed the limits of loudness thanks to advances in digital technology. The 'war' refers to the competition among record companies to make louder and louder albums by compressing the dynamic range. But the loudness war could be doing more than simply pumping up the volume and angering aficionados — it could be responsible for halting technological advances in sound quality for years to come... From the mid 1980s to now, the average loudness of CDs increased by a factor of 10, and the peaks of songs are now one-tenth of what they used to be."

Comments

Re:That's why you have a volume knob.

[damaki]

Don't you think that if the volume is low in a part of a song, it is because it was made so that it is low ? Maybe there is a motivation, you know, like an artistic one. I do not think that a single violin should be as loud as a full fledged orchestra, and that a whisper should be as loud as a shout.
If you do not like to turn the knob, stop listening to music. Each album has its own volume, each song too.

The issue is not much about turning the volume knob. The problem is that you cannot *unturn* the dynamic range knob. I can use replaygain to have constant album volume, while I can only cry about bringing back the lost dynamics.

Re:Is MP3 louder than uncompressed?

[AeroIllini]

The layman's description of how MP3s work is that the look for soft frequencies that will be pyschoaccoustically masked by the loud parts of other frequencies, and then information to encode those is removed. You must know some really smart laymen.

The real layman's description of how mp3s work is the black box model: CD goes in here, mp3 comes out there. It's smaller now.