Back in October I posted on the so-called ‘loudness wars’ (Just Loud). Since then a couple of other useful sources have come to my attention:
Firstly, there’s an excellent in-depth article here on Wikipedia, with a particularly useful set of References and some well-conceived visual examples. For example, there’s an illuminating image sequence showing the time-domain representations of four successive releases of Something by The Beatles which highlights the incredible extent to which modern CD releases are being (over) compressed. And in a similar vein, there are these two images of Abba’s One Of Us, the first from a 1981 CD release, the second from a 2005 reissue:
I’m sorry, but this is nothing short of butchery…
The second article is in a similar vein and is here at Record-Producer.com. What’s interesting about this article is that the included audio examples have been processed to show what it is your adding when you over-compress/limit. Incidentally, a very odd piece of music!
Finally, there’s this article from Wired’s Listening Post, which is really about the sound of vinyl compared to that on CD. It only mentions the ‘loudness wars’ in passing, but it seems to me to be part of the overall debate.
It’s around this time of year that I start my classes on audio mastering. One of the big issues for me is the abuse of limiting plug-ins, and so it was with some delight that I recently came across this useful little movie on YouTube:
There are places when limiting heavily may be appropriate: mastering tracks for club-bound 12″ vinyl, for example. But most of the time people are being seduced by the most superficial of signifiers—pure volume—when really anyone wanting it louder just has to turn it up for themselves.
This isn’t some esoteric geek issue, either: even The Guardian have written a very good little article about the “loudness wars” here. What’s interesting is that it obviously isn’t the mastering engineers who are doing it—in fact they’re complaining like crazy—but the record companies and, tragically, the artists themselves. Even Paul Simon is at it!!!!
This cult of loudness extends through to the finished product: Thomas Lund at TC Electronics has shown how modern CDs are simply recorded too ‘hot’. His research shows a 2002 Eminem CD generating around 25 instances of “obvious distortion” every 10 seconds! Read the full Distortion To The People paper here.
