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

What pisses me off

[Colin Smith]

Are TV adverts where they do exactly the same. It means I either have to muck around with the volume I was happy with or change channel. Obviously I do the latter.

Re:What pisses me off

[gfxguy]

No, that's usually just coincidence.

The time of the commercial breaks, though, can be annoyingly consistent across networks, so channel flipping doesn't help much.

My current solution is dual tuner Tivo. They are surprisingly inexpensive for the non-HD ones, now. So when you watch live TV, and a commercial comes on, you can pause it and switch tuners. It's true there might be a commercial on the other station you want to watch, but you can pause that, too.

After one segment of the show, you'll never have to watch commercials.

I guess I'm just a thief.

Re:"It's Good Enough"

[stoolpigeon]

Well I can tell you where my tolerance comes from - I can't tell the difference.
 
When I was in high school I spent an afternoon once in a recording studio and these guys did this one part of a song over and over and over. It was driving me nuts because it sounded exactly the same every single time (to me).
 
Earlier this week I downloaded an album that is being marketed in a kind of shareware method (saw a link for it in a sig here at the dot) and so what you download is a lower bitrate (or whatever it is called) and the artist hopes you will like it enough to buy the higher quality files. The thing is, what he is giving away sounds just fine to me. Maybe someone with a better ear for this stuff would care, but I don't. And I struggle to see how this is a problem. If I am enjoying a song - I am enjoying it.
 
In other areas of my life I consciously choose to be satisfied with lower quality because I can't afford the best stuff. (optics come to mind as a great example) I have friends who can afford Swarovski and give me grief about the 'junk' I use. I feel the same way about this music stuff. For people who can really tell the difference, I can understand why they get passionate about it, but I just can't get that worked up over it as it's an issue that doesn't even really exist for me. I only know about it because someone tells me.

"Aficionados"

[Anonymous Coward]

There is your first problem. People who look at music as an elevated art that needs to be bowed down to.

Coming from someone in the field, paid by the people you all hate, and also holds undergrads in areas of perception and music and currently working on my final thesis beyond that, we are giving the listeners what they want. This has been well documented over the years that the loudness and distortion are only problems upon multiple listenings, and even then, only upon critical review, hence the idiots that want to know how Rikki Rocket blickemed the drum solo in the 1983 line up of Poison.

In other words, it doesn't matter.

What do listeners want? They want wallpaper. They want something even and uneventful that they can drive to. 95% of all music listened to these days is listened to in the car. That is what it is sold for. Drivetime radio, or burning iTunes tracks to listen to between 730 to 845 and then again at 530 to 645. Two hours a day.

Personally, I don't care much for what recorded music sounds like. I've had my share and I've never heard anything even remotely close to what I know it the real thing. I could care less that the RIAA is beating down teens who pass bad music, I think it is a lesson in aesthetics, not economics, because I don't know anyone in the music industry that likes the crap kids are listening to. This is why we all have our secret bands that we get signed for the fuck sakes of getting signed, promote them all we can, knowing none of the tin-eared teens are going to appreciate it, and take time away to personally make certain that the shit is recorded correctly. The rest? Who the fuck cares. I say jail anyone listening to it.

So if things are clipped and enloundened, you only have bad listeners and human psychoacoustic understanding to blame.

Sometimes it makes sense all around

[eagl]

Sometimes dynamic compression is a good thing all around.

I often am forced to listen to my music in either a loud environment or in an area where I must keep the music volume as low as possible. A wide dynamic range means that in order to hear the quiet parts, the louder parts are unacceptably loud.

Yes if all I ever did was listen to music inside a quiet, soundproof room all by myself, then I'd want the widest possible dynamic range. But since I am almost never in that situation, I find myself artificially compressing the dynamic range myself because I want to be able to hear the quiet parts without bugging everyone else or blowing out my ears during the loud sections.

Plus I'm not an adolescent gangsta wannabe so overall volume and the ability to irritate others by playing my music at full volume simply isn't an issue. And frankly I couldn't care less about the type of music where that sort of thing is an objective, so if that sort of music is "ruined" by dynamic compression it just doesn't bother me in the least. I'm not going to stand on principle to save from destruction something I find offensive, and it's silly to try to get people concerned about the destruction of an industry that they find offensive. I like classical music and rock, and as far as I can tell neither one is being ruined by dynamic compression. You still need a quiet environment to really experience good classical music, and somehow I don't find myself too concerned with not having to strain to hear the words in Holiday or September.

If you're offended by me listening to me listening to Mozart with my windows up and the system down, let me know and I'll see what I can do to be less irritating (heh).

Try it for yourself!

[mattgreen]

I listen mostly to modern rock. I was curious to see how much I'd gotten used to the compression of modern albums. After reading the Wikipedia article, I saw they mentioned that Superunknown, so I pulled it up. Keep in mind I haven't listened to it in several years.

Wow! I'd forgotten music could sound this good! And I'm not even a huge fan of grunge these days. The lack of compression in the music seems to make it less tiring to listen to. The soundstage is bigger, the music seems to breathe a little more, and it generally ebbs and flows more. I'm listening on a pair of $30 Sennheiser headphones, not audiophile-grade equipment by any means.

Once again, we see the danger of pandering to the lowest common denonimator: you end up pissing everyone off eventually. It is a shame that we persist in thinking this is necessary. Of course, it is difficult to be surprised by it, given that the music industry is about selling the performer as a product instead of producing art.

Re:It's a serious problem

[Hijacked Public]

Your reference to light and shade provides me the operning to point out that, in photography, there is a trend toward oversaturating color in all shots.

Velvia used to be a moderately popular film that was used my photographers to make some kind of artistic statement through oversaturation. You usually saw it used when someone wanted to emphasize some garish contrast in colors. These days oversaturation is standard practice for some people, for every photo they make. Every photo looks like a Nickelodeon commercial.

To flip the analogy around, the visual noise in the photos blares out at you the entire time, and you leave the gallery with your eyes ringing, desensitized to stuff like stoplights. Subtle contrast is overpowered and lost.

I think people in general are just getting more used to noise, all the time, and to get their attention you have to keep stepping it up.

it's the cars that go bump

[jgarra23]

May sound like a weird topic but it's true. I'm seeing soooo much mis-information in these threads it's ridiculous. The dynamic range is being compressed, yes. This doesn't make your cds "louder" than a "quiet" cd, it reduces the dynamic range between the sounds so loud doesn't sound so "loud" as quiet.

Now, the reason record companies are doing this, yes, to maximize profits, but that cynical answer doesn't explain how or why really. The real reason is because people in cars with loud stereo systems aren't able to distinguish the dynamic ranges in a loud, noisy, moving environment so they compress the sound to make it sound best in cars. Really. Take say, the latest Front Line Assembly album (crazy loud) and listen to it in your car. It sounds great. It's compressed all to hell. On headphones it sounds like a mess though. Now take any Dire Straits album, particularly Brothers In Arms (Quiet as a mouse) and listen to it in your car. It's quiet, you can't hear it, it sounds like crap. Now listen to it on headphones and it sounds incredible. Why? The dynamic range is there so you can hear the nuances of the music throughout the album, unlike the former album where everything sounds approximately the same level.

THat is the difference between loud and quiet and compression on dynamic range.

Radio

[Detritus]

Radio is even worse. Many stations operate under the philosophy of 100% modulation, all the time. They also use multi-band compressors that split the audio into multiple frequency bands and independently compress each band. The result is boring and fatiguing, with no dynamic range. FM, and even AM, radio can sound very good with decent equipment and engineering. The problem isn't money or knowledge, it's station managers that have become obsessed with producing a "competitive sound".

Re:I have the solution

[djdavetrouble]

A common test back in the day would be to play a master mix through the shittiest AM radio type
gear, or a 6x9 speaker and see how it sounded, since 90% of everyone would be hearing it on similar
gear.

My own experience of it

[jpfed]

A few years ago, I wrote an album using sounds generated within Matlab. The idea was to produce an album that was as entirely original as I could- not using any recorded sounds, and not using synthetic sounds that I had not created myself with my own algorithms.

When it came to mixing the album, I adjusted things as best I could, but I had no background along those lines. I got feedback from my friends that the loud portions were too loud and the quiet portions were too quiet. But I didn't know to what degree the audio should be compressed. I was at square one.

I took a cross-section of tracks from my ripped CD library and measured their peak level and RMS level. Having this information would tell me what people would be used to. Unfortunately, the only consistent pattern that I found was that the higher the RMS level, the later the release date of the CD. :(

Here's a good explanation...

[nocaster]

of what happens when a new album is mastered.

Brick Wall Limiting

I found the latest Oasis album to be particularly offensive in this regard. The audio literally sounds like it was smashed against a brick wall and my ears are fatigued after a few minutes of listening. I honestly don't know if I like the album or not because I can't listen to it long enough to tell.

Short answer.

[juuri]

You know...I've often wondered why kids of today, aren't as into getting good sound reproduction, as they were when I grew up.

Short answer:

Because unless you had especially well connected friends or super hip parents you had much less of a sampling pool. It was important for each song to sound as well as possible since you would be hearing it, much, more often. Today's kids/teens have a huge wealth of music, even in the pop arena.

The appeal of old records

[Prototerm]

My 14 year old son was digging around in the basement last year and found my collection of around 1200 record albums (sealed and properly stored in air-tight containers). Since then, he's been busily digitizing them, even where he has the "remastered" CD version (the record companies say "remastered" as if it's a good thing). It appears they sound better to his young ears, even with the occasional clicks and pops, and while he can't explain why, he prefers them to the more modern alternatives.

No wonder the new audio format discs haven't taken off.

As for me, my ears have deteriorated from going to too many rock concerts over the years. It all sounds the same to me now.

Re:I have the solution

[timeOday]

Yes, many people and many systems can't tell the difference. A casual listener listening to terrestrial radio in a car hasn't a chance in h*** of noticing

A car is one place where dynamic range compression is arguably desirable. Because there's so much background noise, you can't hear quiet sounds anyways, so without compression you simply miss out on part of the music.

Also, unlike data compression (such as mp3) dynamic range compression isn't hard to hear or notice; it isn't even supposed to be. All it means is everything is about the same volume. So you *can't* have a brooding quiet passage suddenly shattered by a loud crash of cymbals. You can't have a discussion at audible volume interrupted by a gunshot so lound it makes your ears ring. You can't because the processing makes everything about the same volume. Live music seems to have a lot more dynamic range - drums especially.

To my thinking, dynamic range compression is a good idea for background sounds that aren't supposed to be too noticeable (like radio music for the most part), but bad for sounds that are supposed to be the center of attention (say, in a movie). Think about images; for stunning images (say, in a gallery) you want lots of dynamic range, but for your desktop wallpaper, not so much.

Re:Vinyl

[swordgeek]

Ah yes. Because they never used compression on vinyl.

Vinyl is NOT better. Good vinyl beats bad CDs. Good CDs beat good vinyl. I've got a pretty large vinyl collection and some modestly high-end playback gear, and I regularly listen to a lot of my records. However, it's simply not as good as CD. Pitch stability, wow/flutter, frequency errors, dynamic range, channel variance, crosstalk, IM and harmonic distortion products, rumble, and so forth are all enormously less on CD than on vinyl, if they exist at all (many disappear entirely in the digital domain).

What about the sound, though? Good sound is good sound. If you're missing that 'airy' sound that good vinyl has, then try this: Get a noise generator, and inject random-phase noise (I _think_ pink noise, 'though I can't remember for sure) at about -80db into the audio stream from your CD player. Suddenly, there's the missing piece.

Records were compressed just as badly as CDs in their heyday. I've got a few albums I've picked up over the years where there's about
10db total dynamic range. However, by compressing the audio and limiting bass response, they could put cut a tighter groove, and put MORE MINUTES onto a record, for greater sales.

Vinyl, CD, even MP3 aren't inherently garbage or great--they're just made that way by cheap record companies who can get away with selling shit-on-a-shingle. Great audio is possible in all of these formats (although MP3 has some caveats)--but it takes care and skill.

Re:Is MP3 louder than uncompressed?

[earlymon]

From your ear's point of view, then the folicles and cells that are tuned to the reatined frequencies, experience more accoustic energy at a given sound level. Eardrum excites the hammer - so the ears are a half-wave rectifier. Naturally occuring sound is non-sinusoidal (excepting some pipe organs) - it's a series of attacks and decays (dissipations), best modeled as a exponentially damped (co)sine waves. Dynamic range is important because 1) duh - it was there in the original source, and 2) the ear-assembly as a half-wave rectifier needs (naturally-occuring) amplitude relaxation.

Clipped music means that the system can't reproduce the transition from wavefront to wave decay over time, so the top of the wave is clipped, or flattened - so, at that point, the system is putting out a biased DC voltage during that time, rather than AC. This causes nasty things in the amplifiers, nastier things in speakers and even nastier things in your ears.

Something like that, anyway.