The 20,000 Hz podcast provided a full history of this, discussing various samples along the way:<p><a href="https://www.20k.org/episodes/loudnesswars" rel="nofollow">https://www.20k.org/episodes/loudnesswars</a><p>It's pretty standard for that podcast, which features lots of stories about sound and sound engineering. There's another interesting article on creating the most silent possible room, and how eerie it feels to be in it.
<a href="https://www.20k.org/episodes/silence" rel="nofollow">https://www.20k.org/episodes/silence</a><p>Another on how restaurants got louder and louder over time, that deep bass sound that's taken over film, another on scientific experiments trying to measure if the Stradivarius is as great a violin as everyone insists, another on the tangled history of the iconic Price is Right theme song... so many really.<p>Great podcast, lots of range given the topic.
The Loudness War is, thankfully, starting to taper off - largely because of YouTube ( <a href="https://productionadvice.co.uk/youtube-loudness/" rel="nofollow">https://productionadvice.co.uk/youtube-loudness/</a> ) and Spotify ( <a href="https://artists.spotify.com/faq/mastering-and-loudness#what-is-loudness-normalization-and-why-is-it-used" rel="nofollow">https://artists.spotify.com/faq/mastering-and-loudness#what-...</a> )<p>Since YT and Spotify are some of the predominant ways people listen to music these days, and they normalize loudness, music producers are starting to go back to more normal masters, thankfully.
Where I was born it used to be dead silence at night till about a decade ago.<p>Then the buses started announcing station names outloud. As the announcement is loud and the bus windows are open, I get woken up from it almost every night.<p>Next street lights started to beep for blind people. While this is a great idea, in practice the level of sound they set makes sense for the day (when the street at busy), but for the night it is way too strong, going into people houses. I got used to sleep with a constant weak beeping sound.<p>Then the e-scooters came, and created three sources of new noise during the night. One when someone touches them ("stealing alert!"), one when someone is looking for them ("location beep") and the last when the van of the company comes to pick them up around 3-4 am.<p><i>sigh</i>, I'm moving to a cabin in the desert.
While I despise the loudness war and the loss of dynamic range, it's worth recognizing that where and how people listen to music has changed drastically in the last 20 years.<p>Moreso than ever in the past, people listen to music in public or otherwise noisy environments. (worse yet) They listen with generally low quality headphones/earbuds.<p>Basically, if the music isn't compressed, they won't hear most of it.<p>Of course, this plus the crappy earbuds and the noisy surroundings means they listen at higher volumes and suffer more hearing damage, which leads to less human sensitivity to sound levels (and more desire for compressed, high volume music).<p>It's very rare for most of us to get to sit in a good room with a good system and listen without interference... but it's really, really nice to do when you can.
Ian Shepherd -- mentioned in the article as the founder of "Dynamic Range Day" -- is one of the great warriors in this battle. He's an extremely knowledgeable mastering engineer (among the darker arts in audio), and has really done a lot to help turn the tide on massively over-compressed audio.<p>But I came here, actually, to put in a plug for a plug(in). He worked with some folks to create a VST called "Loundness Penalty." You throw that on your master channel, and it will tell you what the various streaming services will do to your audio (for example, by how many dB Spotify, Apple Music, You Tube, and so forth will turn your audio up or down based on the integrated LUFS reading).<p>Even more impressive is a plugin he worked on called "Perception" that can avoid the inevitable psychoacoustic bias (to which we are all naturally subject) of thinking that because this track with this effect chain is louder than without it (or with another effect chain) it must be "better."<p>These are commercial products, available from an outfit called MeterPlugs (<a href="https://www.meterplugs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.meterplugs.com/</a>).<p>I should say that I've never met Ian, and have no connection to this company. I do work with audio in a professional context, however.<p>I should also say that I really think the tide is finally turning on all of this. I don't know that the "loudness wars" are absolutely in the rear-view mirror, but I think there's a lot more awareness of the issue. And I also think that fly-by-night mastering engineers who proceed to crush the hell out of your tracks with limiters and whatnot don't get as many repeat customers as they once did. And there's better metering in general for getting a track to have proper dynamics without having the listener feel the constant need to turn the volume up and down.
Daft Punk's <i>Random Access Memories</i> is mentioned in the article, and it really does have good dynamic range .. for the 2010's<p>But compared to an album like Spies 1988 <i>Music of Espionage</i> which has a dynamic range that used the most of the CD format (especially track 3 - "Interlude" -- listen for the drum hits at 0:39 after the organ chords), it just isn't (technically) comparable.<p>I have stopped buying older CDs off Amazon, switching to Discogs so that I can be sure to get an original pressing - made before it had been "remastered".
My spouse's father is a well known (Grammy nominated) mastering engineer.<p>He hated the loudness wars. It was, often times, bands and labels insisting that the albums be "louder" than whatever other comparable album they were trying to emulate, and thus it just escalated with no real sense until it just got ridiculous.
"ReplayGain is a proposed standard published by David Robinson in 2001 to measure the perceived loudness of audio in computer audio formats such as MP3 and Ogg Vorbis. It allows media players to normalize loudness for individual tracks or albums. This avoids the common problem of having to manually adjust volume levels between tracks when playing audio files from albums that have been mastered at different loudness levels."<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayGain" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReplayGain</a>
Watching without headphones feels impossible nowadays. The talking volume is low, but the music is top whack. So you need to keep turning the volume down each time there is music otherwise it is embarrassingly/annoyingly loud.
This is a consistent bugbear of mine, and I think a big factor in the resurgence of vinyl. I find it frustrating I can take a recording from a format with limited dynamic range and stereo separation, which is incredibly vulnerable to environmental contamination and vibration, where the playback device adds its own bundle of mechanical noise and unusual non-linear responses... and yet if I have a good pressing it will sound better than a "digital remaster" CD which has none of these inherent issues, because the digital copy has been compressed and limited to the point where it's fatiguing to listen to.<p>That said, I've bought a few modern albums which have been <i>really</i> nicely mastered; they've got that rich, deep '70s LP sound but available on a FLAC download without all the surface noise and rumble.<p>Also that section on the '60s loudness war underplays quite how LOUD some of those old mono 45s are... I typically set things up so my peaks are at -12dB when recording, and I have the odd mid-1960s single which will be pegged right up against the red if I don't adjust the levels. No wonder there were some pressings that were notorious for throwing the stylus out of the groove when people started chasing ultra-low tracking weights in the early '70s.
"Rage Against The Machine" exemplifies the victory in this war: they made clipping integral to the music. I wonder if they're still waiting for the world to get the joke.
It's an interesting thing. When you participate in this war as a creator of recorded music, as I do, you're sacrificing dynamic range so that your track fits in with everyone else's. For some types of music, it's a trade-off worth making, for others, not so much. Getting <i>close</i> to what the pros do is pretty straightforward if you have experience and a real mastering tool. Those tools are getting smart about analyzing your track and building an eq/compressor/limiter/maximizer stack that rocks, but the gods of top-40, for example, can make real magic happen when it comes to loud-but-not-distorted.
<i>The loudness war (or loudness race) refers to the trend of increasing audio levels in recorded music, which reduces audio fidelity, and according to many critics, listener enjoyment.</i>
Noisia (dnb producers) are notorious for this...<p>I had a couple of Noisia records that sounded ridiculously louder than all my other music. I guess it's part of the "authentic" vinyl mixing experience to have to manually adjust a turntable trim mid-mix to avoid it sounding ridiculous.
A very detailed article about dynamic range and the Loudness War: <a href="https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/dynamic-range-loudness-war" rel="nofollow">https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/dynamic-range-loud...</a>
One thing the article doesn't mention is mastering for listening environment context: Classical music that takes full advantage of dynamic range is very easy to listen to in a quiet room; but difficult to listen to in a car or airplane. This is because the quiet (delicate) parts get drowned out by road / air noise.<p>Anyway, this is one of the concepts that is forgotten when people discuss music in 5.1: Part of the point is that a 5.1 mix can be a "living room" mix, where the engineer can make an uncompromised mix, and leave the compromises for listening in a car, or with crappy headphones, in the stereo mix.
On Netflix, I found a trick to have the full dynamic range of sound: You have to keep the volume to a minimum in the netflix player, and to compensate, have the volume at maximum in your computer. I am very sensitive to the respect of the dynamic range, this is very important in order to have pleasure listening. It is the same problem with photos and video games : In an "HDR" treated image, the sky is much to dark, leading to a non realistic image.
I always loved this piece on this topic: <a href="http://ozzgod.com/dynamicrange/death.html" rel="nofollow">http://ozzgod.com/dynamicrange/death.html</a>, which has been moving around the internet (my old link was dead, and even it was a copy of the original) for as long as I can remember.
Reminds me of compiling ACCGain to normalize tracks from Apple store in Amarok:
<a href="https://jonasfj.dk/2007/08/volume-normalization-with-amarok/" rel="nofollow">https://jonasfj.dk/2007/08/volume-normalization-with-amarok/</a><p>These days I just use Spotify :)
Reminds me of "DJ Double R The Loudness King" aka Rick Rubin, probably one of the most famous producers these days/the last 20-30 years: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rubin" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Rubin</a>
I think there's another type of 'loudness war' going on with how we communicate. One of my peeves in particular the catastrophication of minor insults as 'hate', as I feel it's diluting our concern over the actual atrocities that happen on the other end of the spectrum.