The loudness war or how the music industry is butchering CD sound quality

[Nostromo]

This video explains very clearly how the music industry is butchering the sound quality of CD's by insisting in making them LOUD.

[Sirotnikov]

i've seen this too and this makes a great deal of sense.

music today sounds much more bland

[MRT144]

this isnt new...I can point all the way back to 1990

[MRT144]

this isnt new...I can point all the way back to 1990 for

[MRT144]

this isnt new...I can point all the way back to 1990 for this

[MRT144]

wow, that is a bizarre, very bizarre tripple post.

[Nostromo]

Nobody said it was new

Yet, not many people are aware of the problem. I posted the video because it explains it clearly

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by MRT144
this isnt new...I can point all the way back to 1990 for this

You can say that again.

[BeBMan]

It's the repetition war or how MRT is butchering poly thread quality

[Caligastia]

Which companies are doing this?

[Nostromo]

From what I hear, the vast majority.

[Dauphin]

I've got Peter Gabriel CDs from the 80s. I always have to turn the volume up as the track is so much quieter than my other CDs.

Anecdotes.

[Nostromo]

From Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

The phrase loudness war (or loudness race) refers to the music industry's tendency to record, produce and broadcast music at progressively increasing levels of loudness to create a sound that stands out from others. This phenomenon can be observed in many areas of the music industry, particularly broadcasting and albums released on CD and DVD. In the case of CDs, the war stems from a desire to create CDs that sound as loud as possible or louder than CDs from competing artists or recording labels.

However, as the maximum amplitude of a CD cannot be increased, the overall loudness can only be increased by reducing the dynamic range and distorting or clipping the waveform of the recording.

Introduction

Loudness

Initially, a loudness war started between FM stations competing for listener ratings. Subsequently, record labels began increasing the loudness of their releases, both on vinyl and on CD, resulting in a volume "arms race". The main reason for this practice is that when comparing two recordings with different levels, it is likely that the louder one will be regarded as sounding better. This can be attributed to the way in which the human ear responds to sound pressure at different levels: as our ability to respond to sound frequencies change according to differences in sound pressure level (SPL), the more the SPL increases[1], the greater the amount of low and high frequency content we perceive. Music with higher levels is easily heard and understood in noisy environments such as: riding a car, a train, or walking on a busy city street. Higher levels can also result in subjectively better sounding recordings on low quality reproduction systems such as: web audio formats, AM radio, mono television and telephones. Compounding this loudness problem is the fact that artists are more inclined to request that their mastered CDs match the loudness level of top contemporary CDs.

Opponents

Apart from audiophiles and hi-fi enthusiasts, this practice has been condemned by several recording industry professionals including Grammy Award-winning mastering engineer Doug Sax, noted recording/mastering engineer Barry Diament, engineer Geoff Emerick (noted for his work with The Beatles from Revolver to Abbey Road), and many others. Even Bob Dylan has condemned the practice, saying "You listen to these modern records, they’re atrocious, they have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like – static."

It is considered unnecessary, as the same effect can be achieved simply by turning up the volume of the playback equipment. Doing it this way does not cause a similar loss of audio detail. In addition, most digital audio players do not have sufficient gain at full volume setting to play older recordings or classical recordings with sufficient loudness[citation needed]. Finally, if a CD is broadcast by a radio station, the station will apply its own signal processing. This further reduces the dynamic range of the broadcast material to closely match levels of absolute amplitude, regardless of the original record loudness.

Opponents have also called for immediate changes in the music industry regarding the level of loudness. In August 2006, the vice-president of A&R for One Haven Music, a Sony Music company, in an open letter decrying the "loudness wars" claimed that mastering engineers are being forced against their will or are preemptively making releases louder in order to get the attention of industry heads.[7] Some music bands are being petitioned to re-release CDs with less distortion[6]. This may indicate a general public discontent to this practice, and a call to put an end to the "Loudness War".

Effects

The practice of increasing a CD's loudness to be louder than competing CDs often results in distortion. In the digital realm, this is usually referred to as clipping. Digital media cannot output signals higher than digital full scale (0dB), so whenever the peak of a signal is pushed past this point, it results in the wave form becoming "clipped". When this occurs, it can sometimes produce an audible "click". However, very often certain sounds like drum hits will reach their peak for only a very short time, and if that peak is much louder than the rest of the signal, this allows an engineer to amplify the recording simply by increasing the volume. The peaks of the drum hits will be clipped, but it will not be noticeable to the casual listener. However, if clipping occurs too much in a recording, or if certain signals are noticeably clipped, it can make the recording sound distorted, making it harsh and fatiguing to listen to. How much is too much is a matter of taste, but most pop CDs, and many classical and jazz CDs have some amount of digital clipping.

Analog media, on the other hand, "bend" the signal as it exceeds its saturation point (also marked as 0dB). Such distortion can be utilized in the digital realm as well, either by transferring audio processed with tape or valve saturation to a digital recording medium, or by using computer software to emulate the effect (this process is often referred to as "bitcrunching" or "soft clipping"). This analog distortion results in harmonics that can appear to the listener as a discreet "crackle" or "fuzz" within the sound. The effect can vary depending on the sound itself, as well as the amount and kind of distortion used. Because analog distortion doesn't "flatline" to the extent that clipping does, the results are less harsh-sounding and can result in a desirable "warmth" to the recording, at the cost of slightly less transient response. The amount of distortion increases the more a signal is overdriven, ranging from transparent to highly audible, and just like digital clipping, certain instruments or musical arrangements can better mask distortion than others.

In other cases, compression or limiting is used. While the resulting distortion is lessened from the final product this way, it has the side effect of significantly reducing transient response (most often heard as lessened drum impact), and, when taken to severe levels, can reduce the natural dynamics of other instruments within the recording. Loudness increasing techniques, however, do not always affect macrodynamics (the difference in volume between sections of a song). For example, loudness-based compressors (such as limiters) will only affect the signal in a "local" manner. Multi-band compression is commonly used to make a mix more uniform and easier to balance, more compatible with low-end equipment, or to achieve a certain "sound" or artistic effect. Slow-acting, broadcast-style compression, on the other hand, will be applied to the music to make the volume in different song sections more uniform. This can make the recording more suitable for background listening or noisy environments, but can also reduce the dynamic expressiveness of the song as a whole.

Note: Some of these examples are explained using RMS (Root Mean Square) power values. In reference to CD audio, these values are based on the calculation of the average of CD audio sample values with digital full scale used as a reference.)

History

The practice of focusing on loudness in mastering can be traced back to the introduction of the compact disc itself, but also existed to some extent when vinyl was the primary released recording medium. Many record companies would print compilation records, and when artists and producers found their song was quieter than others on the compilation, they would insist that their song be remastered to be competitive. Also, many Motown records pushed the limits of how loud records could be made, and record labels there were "notorious for cutting some of the hottest 45s in the industry." However, because of the limitations of the vinyl format, loudness and compression on a released recording were restricted in order to make the physical medium playable — restrictions which do not exist on digital media such as CDs — and as a result, increasing loudness levels never reached the significance that they have in the CD era. In addition, modern digital audio effects processing allows mastering engineers to have greater control over the loudness of a song; for example, it gives them the ability to use a "brick wall" limiter which limits the volume level of an audio signal with no delay (analog equivalents have a short delay due to processing time).

The stages of CD loudness increase are often split over the two-and-a-half decades of the medium's existence. Since CDs were not the primary medium for popular music until the tail end of the 1980s, there was little motivation for competitive loudness practices then. CD players were also very expensive and thus commonly exclusive to high-end systems that benefited less from higher recording levels during this period. In addition, for the first four or five years of the CD, there was absolutely no way for a recording to be compressed in the digital domain, as signal processing in the digital domain did not exist for mastering engineers.

As a result, the two common practices of mastering CDs involved either matching the highest peak of a recording at, or close to, digital full scale, or referencing digital levels along the lines of more familiar analog VU meters. When using VU meters, a certain point (usually -6 dB, or 50% of the disc's amplitude on a linear scale) was used in the same way as the saturation point (signified as 0db) of analog recording, with several dB of the CDs recording level reserved for amplitude exceeding the saturation point (often referred to as the "red zone", signified by a red bar in the meter display), because digital media cannot exceed 0db. The RMS level of the average rock song during most of the decade was around -18 dB.

At the turn of the decade CDs louder than this level began to surface, and CD volumes became more and more likely to exceed the digital limit as long as such amplification would not involve clipping more than approximately two to four digital samples, resulting in recordings where the peaks on an average rock or beat-heavy pop CD hovered near (usually in the range of -3dB) 0db but only occasionally reached it. Guns N' Roses's 1987 album Appetite for Destruction is an early example of this, with RMS levels averaging -15 dB for all the tracks.

In the early 1990s, some mastering engineers decided to take this a step further, and treat the CDs levels exactly as they would the levels of an analog tape and equate digital full scale with the analog saturation point, with the recording just loud enough so that each (or almost every) beat would peak at or over 0 dB. Though there were some early cases (such as Metallica's self-titled "Black Album" in 1991[citation needed]), albums mastered in this fashion generally did not appear until 1992. Alice in Chains's Dirt, Rage Against the Machine's self-titled debut and Faith No More's Angel Dust are some examples from this year[citation needed]. The loudness of CDs during this period varied massively depending on the philosophies of the engineer and others involved in the mastering process. 1994 was the year in which this style of "hot" mastering became commonplace[citation needed], though exceptions, such as the album Superunknown by Soundgarden from the same year, still existed[citation needed]. The most common loudness for a rock CD in terms of RMS power was around -12 dB. Overall, most rock and pop CDs released in the 1990s followed this method to a certain extent.

The concept of making CDs "hotter" began to appeal to people within the industry, due in part to how noticeably louder CDs had become, and also in part to the notion that customers preferred louder CDs. Engineers, musicians and labels each developed their own ideas of how CDs could be made louder. While the increase in CD loudness was gradual throughout the 1990s, some opted to push the format to the limit, such as on Oasis' widely popular album (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, which reached -8 dB on many of its tracks[9] — a rare occurrence, especially in the year it was released (1995). In 1997, Iggy Pop assisted in the remix and remaster of the 1973 album Raw Power by his former band The Stooges, creating an album which, to this day, is arguably the loudest rock CD ever recorded. It has an RMS of -4 dB in places, which is rare even by today's standards.

The standards of loudness would reach its limit in the 2000s. -10 dB has been the standard for the past several years, but this is often pushed to -9 dB, and occasionally higher. Quieter exceptions to today's standards are rare.

Interpretations

Views regarding the impact of the loudness war are heavily subjective. Proponents of louder CDs claim that consumers prefer louder CDs and that they are better for most busy listening environments. Many hold the opinion that only a handful of albums (such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers 1999 release Californication, a CD with such excessive amounts of high-frequency digital clipping that audio enthusiasts have made complaints) are examples worth considering, while other, more fanatical types believe any CD where digital full scale is frequently utilized (or when mastering processes are used solely to prevent such when attempting the same volume) should be considered unacceptable. Likewise, many listeners do not notice the effects, some consider it a minor annoyance, and others find themselves completely unable to listen to albums mastered in a loudness-based fashion.

[Caligastia]

How can I find out which companies do this, and which don't?

[Nostromo]

Originally posted by Dauphin
I've got Peter Gabriel CDs from the 80s. I always have to turn the volume up as the track is so much quieter than my other CDs.

Anecdotes.

I use Replay Gain. It works fairly well.

In 2001, Replay Gain was created as a new proposed standard for digital audio formats. Replay Gain scanning software calculates the perceived loudness of an individual track or album and stores the gain data in the file's tags so that a Replay Gain compliant player may adjust the playback level to a standard level. When gain is adjusted like this, "hot" compressed tracks can often sound slightly quieter than older less compressed material.