Was there any way we could have prevented the "loudness war"?
Unfortunately, most musicians are just hoping you will notice their song when it comes up on the radio, pandora, a friends iPhone and so everyone is incentivized to crank their song to the max.
The thing that bums me out is that there were really good records released in the 2000's that are mastered terribly, and we may never hear a better version. It's one thing when a stooges album is fucked up on re-release, I can always grab the original, there may never be another version of "Is This It".
I wonder if the lower dynamic range of LPs restricts music released on them from being overly loud, and thus not as fatiguing to listen to as more modern formats.
It is technically the case that vinyls have less frequency response (basically a low pass filter) than good (really effectively perfect) reproduction formats like CD. That certainly means that the maximum loudness value is lower, but dynamic range is not required for loudness, gain and frequency response are.
If anything, having less dynamic range would encourage people to make louder records.
The only reason to sample at 96/192k is to make cheaper analog filter hardware. While technically vinyl can reproduce frequencies in excess of 50kHz, it has limits on amplitudes at high (audible) frequencies because of the physics of the needle and groove, especially on less-than-excellent cartridges. Nobody wants to listen to something with that much energy in the highest audible frequencies (16-20kHz) anyway, so it's a moot point.
There is absolutely no point in representing frequencies in excess of 22.05kHz. Truly exceptional (never documented) human ears might technically be capable of faintly hearing 23 or 24kHz tones, but that ability is likely to manifest and deteriorate over the course of (at most) a handful of contiguous years in their life and never return.
There is no difference between discrete signals sampled at 44.1kHz, and continuous signals, that has any bearing on human hearing. In addition, 14 bits is about enough to represent all discernible dynamic range in human hearing, 16 bits is more than enough. Vinyl has considerably less dynamic range than this. Any vinyl on any record player has poor performance for reproducing audible signals when compared to an about-average CD player. LP vinyl is an excellent final form of the phonograph, but a mere intermediate to poor form in all of audio reproduction, especially considering that CD is essentially perfect.
When I was in my twenties, I could easily identify sounds in the 23-26k range (tested using professional gear more than once). When I was younger it was quite painful to hear as my ears were so sensitive to it (as a young teen, I would wince in pain when a monitor was left on without an input signal even in a room of people yelling noisily at each other). Even now in my late 30s I can still readily hear in the low 20k hz easily.
(?)
There's an excellent example of this occurring in the recent remastered re-release of Oasis's Be Here Now which had horribly thick and overdone production but has now been opened up somewhat. It's still loud, but it's Oasis after all.
I don't have an example of the before, but the 'after' is good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyJU2136ym4 .. interestingly, this is also an example of remastering and re-editing an old music video too.
Most people also just aren't listening through good equipment that emphasizes good dynamics. Tons of people are happy listening to compressed songs through the earbuds they got for free with their phone.
Same goes for photography, poetry etc etc.. mass market doesn't mesh well with that.
[1] whether by society or by your own passion
Which is a shame. Hell, their first three albums strike me as pretty poorly mastered with all of the clipping on some of the louder tracks.
The loudness war started before CD, but if we had this stuff back then it might have been possible to avoid these problems. As a consumer, I add BS.1770-based replaygain tags to all of my music, and set a constant gain offset for all applications which don't have loudness normalization.
I'm most annoyed by albums which have huge loudness gradients for completely different movements or independent tracks, it forces me to manually remove album replaygain tags in favour of the track values.
Notable also, this page makes no mention of loudness monitoring, which I think is outrageous. To complain about this problem without mentioning the existing solution is pretty bogus.
Nigel: (pause) These go to eleven.