Loudness War
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Grab Metallica's Death Magnetic. Listen through it all the way.
Now find the Guitar Hero III remastered version of the same album, listen through it.
I guarantee you feel exhausted after the official master version, because there is no dynamic range, it's just a full spectrum of noise.
Here's a Youtube video visualising the difference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Nfqpr3ygSg
Honestly maybe loudness war is a wrong term? Should be dynamic range war or compression war.
I had trouble figuring that out at first because I thought that one of the tracks would be retail and the other would be GH3. What the video actually shows is the left and right channels of the edited together retail and GH3 tracks.
Also interesting how this war ended:
> Mastering engineer Bob Katz had argued that "The last battle of the loudness war has been won", claiming that mandatory use of Sound Check by Apple would lead to producers and mastering engineers to turn down the level of their songs to the standard level, or Apple will do it for them. He believed this would eventually result in producers and engineers making more dynamic masters to take account of this factor.
- Showroom effect. You want to put your best foot forward when a consumer is only dipping in for a moment. Louder grabs attention harder.
- Crappy consumer stereo equipment. Low sensitivity, poor linearity, disposable earbuds and android phone speakers are the default. There's no room for nuance on those systems.
I had some serious deja vu reading that as I knew I had head it before. Took me minute to find it but it's said (almost) verbatim at 0:23 seconds into this song [0] that was on a playlist I sometimes listen to.
[0] https://open.spotify.com/track/17NCISfYJl0GITXs8G75Ae?si=4dd...
Here's an old but related site / campaign with lots of links too: https://www.turnmeup.org/
What controls how loud a piece of recorded music is playing at? The volume knob/buttons (depending on the device); or to put it another way, when you are playing the music for yourself, you control it. If you turn the knob all the way down it will be quiet, if you turn it all the way up, it will be loud. It is therefore trivial to play an album from 1950 louder than an album from 2020: if you want your 1950s jazz record to play louder than your 2020 metal record, the means for doing so is literally at your fingertips.
What has actually happened is that the dynamic range of recorded music has decreased. Dynamic range is the difference between the smallest and largest parts of the signal. Audio compressors reduce the peak amplitude of the signal and can also boost the weaker parts of the signal, so the effect is that the parts of music that were musically intended to be quieter start to sound just as loud as every other part in the music.
This does not mean that the actual volume of the sound coming out of your speakers is any greater, again, you control that with the volume knob. In fact, I would bet that the end result is that the parts of songs that are musically intended to be the loudest tend not to be emitted at as high a volume as they would be otherwise.
The reason for that: if a piece of music has quiet parts (especially at the beginning, as is common in intros), you tend to turn it up. Now that you have increased the total volume, when the loud/energetic part of the song comes on, it will be louder than it would have been had you not turned it up (obviously). If there are not quiet parts, then you never need to turn it up, and you will tend to listen to the music at a consistent level, thus avoiding the peaks of maximum volume that would have occurred had the music had more dynamic range.
This is also why this issue is most annoying when you are listening to a range of different music from different eras (e.g. an eclectic playlist), or, when your music is interspersed with ads. You will turn up music that has greater dynamic range, but then a heavily compressed song or ad will come on, and now your volume setting is much too high to listen to it comfortably.
Lastly, in terms of why: the louder music is, the better it tends to sound (up to a certain point of course). To really get the full experience of a piece of music, you need to listen to it fairly loud. So in an era of songs with plenty of dynamic range, people could make songs stand out by making them much louder by comparison. Once the dynamic range of everything has been ruined, however, this effect goes away and the end result is what you have today.
Volume is a pure measure of energy output, primarily controlled by a volume knob. Loudness is a psychoacoustic effect that measures our perception of loudness. Compressing the dynamic range of music makes it sound louder at all volumes, compared to music with a wider dynamic range.
So the loudness wars is an apt name. The deliberate compressions on music made the music sound louder, without people turning up the volume of the music, but in the process destroys any nuance in the music. Turning down the volume knob doesn’t reduce the effect in a meaningful way, sure it reduces the energy output of your speakers, but it won’t restore the nuance of the music, or eliminate clipped peaks where the music has exceeded the bit-depth of the digital carrier.
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A hearing researcher at House Ear Institute is concerned that the loudness of new albums could possibly harm listeners' hearing, particularly that of children.[48] The Journal of General Internal Medicine has published a paper suggesting increasing loudness may be a risk factor in hearing loss.[50][51]
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I assume that a "psychoacoustic effect" would not harm anyone's hearing, whereas volume - i.e. the measure of energy ouput - would, right? (And I know that agreeing with this statement doesn't invalidate your main point, I'm simply curious whether you agree with me that a reduction in dynamic range doesn't seem likely to harm anyone's hearing.)
In terms of your main point, I'm not sure I agree, but I really only have my own experience to draw upon, and am quite willing to concede the point. But to me, music with less dynamic range doesn't sound "louder", it sounds "more even", or something along those lines.
One of the things my wife does that drives me nuts when watching movies is she acts like a human compressor: she keeps the remote in her hand and turns down loud parts and turns up quiet parts. If I put the volume at a level that is appropriate, where quiet dialogue is audible but the loud parts (e.g. a car chase) are loud (as the filmmaker intended!) she will exclaim, "it's too loud!"
I offer this single anecdote as evidence that perhaps music with greater dynamic range can actually be perceived as louder, depending on the circumstances?
Not quite true. It’s a psychoacoustic effect because it’s something that can’t be observed outside of someone’s conscience, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a mechanical component to the effect.
Most importantly, the effect almost certainly has a substantial mechanical component that’s determined by how effectively your hearing system can couple sounds from your outer-ear into your inner-ear. Like all mechanical systems it’s transfer function is non-linear, it’s much better at coupling some frequencies that other frequencies.
If the compression done to the music is pushing the sound to in a frequency band that’s more strongly coupled, then energy output from the speaker might be the same, but the amount that ends up in your inner ear will increase, bringing with it higher chances of permanent damage.
With this you destroy the music. Maybe ok for your favorite Disco tune but but it turns Rock, Alternative and Classical music into crap That's why i cannot listen to classical music and some other music as mp3.
Some people backed the wrong horse. Much music exists mastered for old shitty car stereos and earbuds and the like. Sometimes, the original recordings are lost or nobody bothers to remaster them.
I like to listen to playlists on shuffle and the inconsistency between different albums has me fiddling with the bass on a song to song basis. Luckily my car has steering wheel controls for this. But most modern vehicles would have you fucking with a touch screen which is a non-starter while driving.
And if your equipment is really really good, you can even hear Jason on Justice :).
I do indeed remember how good it sounded. Also had a Sony Walkman, pretty good but nothing like a good furniture-size stereo.
This is kind of repeating with playlists now. Not all services normalize perceived loudness across tracks (e.g. Spotify web player).
And related cause: A&R people listening to xyz's new album and judging it sounds "huge" / "phat" / "modern"... when actually it's just a bit louder than the other guys, but nobody's adjusting volumes between demos...