Slashdot Mirror
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."
Why is it that articles like this hardly ever include audio examples? Without audio examples, it's drastically more difficult for a casual reader to understand what they're talking about. As it stands, the article aims itself at the small group of people who know enough about sound to understand what they're talking about, but not enough to already be familiar with it. This problem seems to be pervasive amongst sound/music writers, they'll spend paragraphs trying to describe a sound in vain rather than just including an audio file and allowing the sound to speak for itself. This may be understandable in print publications, but on the web it's just ridiculous.
Trying to describe a sound is often difficult to the point of being futile. Don't bother, just let us listen to it and reserve the writing for describing other things about the sound. Let audio and print do what each does best.
Would probably be a format that supports compression information. Basically your make it so that the playback unit has to have a compressor/limiter built in. Hell, these days DSPs are cheap enough you could probably have a real nice multi-band one. Then the music format would have information for levels of compression built in it. You could pick how compressed you wanted it, the compressor would deal with it.