The Loudness Race

[AKA]

The Loudness Race

By Wes Lindstrom
loudnessrace.net

It's often been said that "what you don't know can't hurt you". But sometimes there's a difference between sensing and knowing, and it's those times when you're being affected by something you can't identify that you are in for a world of hurt. Like when that masked armed robber that breaks into your house, mutilates your cat and steals your belongings. You call the cops on the wrongdoer in hopes to get some retribution, but with no ID they're not really going to have an easy time making out the current threat. Which brings us to the recording industry.

With the advent of digitized music and file-sharing services, the general public has finally its first glimpse at the ludicrous and downright immoral ideas that run through the minds of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) through their masses of lawsuits and paralegal tactics in an attempt to shut down any means of transferring music that isn't officially sanctioned by them and them only, which includes the current cesspools of bubblegum trash known as MTV and commercial radio conglomerate Clear Channel. And through the publication of knowledge given to industry experts such as Steve Albini, the "price fixing" policies of the RIAA, gradually lifting CD prices to ludicrous levels and paying the artists who made the very material on recordings possible a mere fraction of what is given to the labels and advertisers, has been brought to light as well.

But there is still one major issue left to deal with in regards to the industry. And as stated in the opening paragraph, it's the one thing that has been nagging you for years, but you just can't put your finger on what it is. And it manifests in issue of people's opinions of new music. So many people switch the radio station whenever the latest commercially-saturated pop song comes on the radio, and often long for "the good old days". Maybe it is the music, or perhaps it is something else. Something residing deep within the public's subconscious that they can't identify.

This website is dedicated to educating the people about just what that phenomenon is.

You've probably heard the term "compression" numerous times in regards to the subject of music and audio. The advent of converting verbose CD audio into a space small enough to send through a modem. But words often have more than one meaning, and can often refer to things that differ drastically. The most commonly known definition of compression in audio refers to eliminating barely or unnoticeable details in sound to fit audible data in a much smaller space. However, audio compression has existed in a different form long before the advent of digital music; this kind works on audio levels. Rather than squeezing audio into a less information-intensive format, this kind reduces them to a narrower range of volume.

What is it for, you ask? Compression has long been a tool to manipulate sound because it works on a microacoustic level. Think of someone fiddling with the volume knob during a song, and reduce that to mere milliseconds. That's how dynamic compression works. It's actually a very versatile thing; it can be used to shape the impact of an instrument when used lightly or alter the overall dynamics entirely. Think of it as the "glue" that holds everything in the recording together. Compression can make details in the music more readily audible, and can bring different sections of a piece closer together in level. This is used all the time in radio stations to get music heard consistently over the constant background noise of the environment.

The purpose of compression is to fit a wide array of details in sound into a smaller space, which brings us to the issue that has brought a lot of chaos into the industry: the limits of the recording medium. Every format has a limit for how loud the sound can be pressed on it, and compression is involved when it comes to getting as much sound against these limits as possible. Since the human ear responds to the average levels of music rather than what the sound peaks fully at, compression can be used to make recordings sound louder by attenuating small portions of sound to make more room for what the ear will perceive.

The recording industry knew this back during the '50s when jukeboxes packed with 45" RPM singles were introduced. Record labels had suddenly developed the notion that if they cut their records louder than a competing label's record they would be noticed more by the listeners and therefore outsell the competition. Each label kept cutting their single more "hot" than the last to extreme levels. Eventually, bands such as the Beatles popularized the concept of 35 RPM LPs, better known as albums, designed for home listening, leading 45"s to no longer become the industry's main selling point and thus quelling the "jukebox scene".

From then on, producers began to start looking into use of compression techniques for effects besides overall loudness. George Martin was one of the first to make significant use of them, and it's been said that his work with the Beatles was ahead of its time because of techniques like such. Phil Spector was another pioneer in this respect, well known for his heavily compressed "wall of sound" style. By the '70s, use of compression had gone beyond simply being a safety device and bands such as Pink Floyd and Steely Dan continued to take it in new directions and push it even further. But it was the '80s when compression really began to be the end-all-be-all of recording. Now that the age of music video had taken hold, music became more of a commercial venture than ever. And with the advent of comptuers, producers, engineers and artists were clamoring over the wealth of things that could now be done in the realm of recording. Suddenly all sorts of production "gimmicks" had come into play: canned reverb, pitch correction, take splicing, synthesizers, multitracking, overdubs, the works. And compression was definitely high on the list. The explosion of the art of recording as both an artistic and commercial venture led to producers and artists getting a sound that people would notice. Something that would be in your face. No longer was the wall of sound a calling card for certain recording engineer prodigies, it was now the standard.

Back to the recording medium. Analog mediums such as vinyl, cassette and 8-track have an amplitude limit called the saturation point. Everything under this point is referenced by a negative number, which means that a portion of the music that is recorded at -12db will be played back at 12 decibels lower than what your stereo is set at. Likewise, sounds that are recorded above this point are measured in positive numbers. The reason the saturation point is referred to as a limit is because anything over the limit goes beyond the indented physical limitations of the medium and becomes distorted. As long as very small portions of the material go over this limit the sound can remain relatively transparent, making it a good reference point for the recording's transient peaks. In fact, a lot of artists and producers have a certain fondness for the warm, fuzzy sound that tape saturation makes, and often recorded their music extremely hot intentionally just for this purpose. The Rolling Stones were famous for this, with records that sound like they were run through a Bigmuff distortion pedal.

CDs, on the other hand, are different. Rather than being a physical medium, they are digital, which means they consist entirely of binary information. Unlike analog, digital audio cannot be recorded at levels over 0db at all, and rather than saturating or distorting, all sound that goes over the mediums limit will be stuck at full scale, resulting in a straight line. This is what is known as clipping. Whereas saturated sound produces a warm, fuzzy distortion, the sound clipped waves make are anything but; rather it results in a harsh, ear-splitting, unnatural noise that is very noticeable if enough of a peak is squared off. That's why digital recording software and digital mixers strongly suggest recording at a soft level so as not to go over 0db.

Anyway, in 1982 a new medium of recording was released to the public: the compact disc. Promising portable sound that never degraded with play or over time, it seemed to be the future of music. At first it was more or less a niche market due to the extremely high prices of early CD player models. Labels only mastered CDs out of necessity, rather than demand, often putting very little effort into the CD mastering process. This combined with digital/analog technology still in its infancy led to some very botched and terrible-sounding CD masters. In the late '80s, however, CD players had reached consumer-level prices and exploded onto the market. Suddenly, labels began to take this new medium very seriously, and digital mastering became a legitimate profession, with mastering houses taking great care to cut as high a quality CD master as possible. One of the issues was taking use of the CDs dynamic range. The first CDs were extremely soft and barely used the upper 6db of the medium because the method was for them to be cut straight from the original analog mixes and normalized so that the levels would correspond with the highest peak at or near 0db. When CDs had become more popular, there was concern about the loss of resolution of unnecessarily quiet masters which prevented full utilization of the CDs 16 bit sound (I won't get into it here as it's really complicated), and engineers agreed that a better method would be to master the CDs at a level where the highest peaks would be in the upper regions more frequently, and exceptionally high peaks would be clipped or limited to keep the levels from being significantly low.

By the early '90s, CDs were not only the new popular medium of choice, they also began to migrate outside of home stereo systems. The advent of the portable CD player allowed CDs to be used in the same method as cassettes were when the portable casette player was first introduced in the '80s. There was one problem, though: CDs weren't as loud as tapes because while tapes have a saturation point (the "plus" range) CDs did not. And since portable equipment does not have nearly the power of a home system, CDs, especially early-to-mid-'80s ones, were restricted to "soft to listenable" if you had a good pair of headphones, there was no "loud" or "angst-ridden ear-blast". So mastering engineers decided to push the loudness of the CD further, this time with lightly saturated peaks much like a "hot" tape. The theory was that very slight, mostly inaudible distortion and bringing down a couple samples of a transient peak were preferable to have a CD that translated better on all systems and utilized more resolution and a noise floor further from the music. The methods used tended to vary: some engineers used digital limiters, some saturated the peaks on the analog mix before transferring to CD, and some simply let the sound clip (whether it was amateurs simply pumping up the levels of the master, or an artifact of early digital limiters "missing" certain peaks). Much controversy has been stated in the audiophile world over these methods, however the general consensus was that despite some peak level neutering, the average levels were mostly untouched and CDs were still very dynamic. And for the first half of the decade or so, it was good.

But then something went horribly wrong.

Without an enforced standard for loudness similar to the one used by the film industry, engineers were wildly inconsistent with how they were to go about the new technology. How much do you limit? How much clipping is too much? Engineers began to get it into their heads that what they had were tools to make their CDs as loud as they possibly could, and eventually the artists began to pick up on it. Frustrated with the limitations of CDs, producers and artists began to resort to heavy amounts of compression and readily audible levels of clipping to try and get a "hotter" record than the competition. The loudness race of the 50's had come back.

As more and more volume was being squeezed out of the CD, the problem began to get exponentially worse. What was considered unthinkable one year became the standard the next. More and more CDs fell prey to the hot CD disease, leaving the situation we have today where the market is saturated with them, and overcompressed, heavily clipped CDs have now become the norm rather than the exception. And the damage done is a lot worse than you might think.

Dynamics is one of the key elements of music. Any music professor will tell you that. The light and shade of a quiet section bursting into a fortissimo passage, a vocalist raising her/his voice, the sudden rush of a drum fill bring excitement to the music, and when those things are neutered the excitement is lost. And it's not just dynamics that overcompression hinders. Transients, the peaks and valleys of a waveform, are necessary for music to have room to breathe. When compressors are cranked to excessive levels these transients are turned from sharp, punchy attacks to dull nubs, and much of the detail is lost as the harmonics are mashed together in a murky mess. The end result is sound that is dull, unnatural, distorted, and painful to listen to.

Now you know why you have a hard time listening to modern music.

The loudness race is one of the most tragic things to ever happen to the music industry. Listening to today's square waves, then going back to a CD released 8 years ago and marveling at the wonderful detail, depth and dynamics of those older CDs makes one long for those days when people took good care of their music. We've been denied the full potential of the CD medium for nearly half a decade. Our music, good and bad, has been turned to sonic mush, robbed of its excitement and aural splendor, murdering great music with noise-ridden mockeries of itself. It's time we took a stand and told the people responsible for this that we won't take any more, that we want those first 15 years of the CD back, that we want a safe industry loudness standard. No more contests to see who can release the hottest CD leading to mangled sonic bricks.

Knowledge is power. Through getting the word out to the public and the artists, producers, engineers and record executives we can stop the loudness race once and for all.