By Fletch Whipp

I enjoy a wide range of music, spanning from the 60′s all the way through to current cutting edge music. From long hours and years spent in the studio it is interesting to analyse music past similar to how a Historian investigates time past.

Some musical trends cause me to smile, others to shudder or wince and remark ‘what were they thinking?’ I believe the current ‘Loudness Wars’ trend could have the potential to cause engineers 20 years from now think, with all the technological advantages they had at the start of the new millenium, how did they become dumber?

for the uninitiated the loudness wars refers to the current trend of mastering music at the maximum volume in an effort for the music to become more powerful. Trying to detail this to those unfamiliar with sound design might be like trying to detail what air is like. It negatively affects the song much more than a simple volume boost, which in itself isn’t such a bad thing. As the videos below will explain however, the end result is that the program material suffers significantly.

Metal giants Metallica’s last release Death Magentic pushed the Loudness War into the mainstream when fans-not audiophiles, complained bitterly about the unappealing sound of the CD. Metallica had released the master tracks to the Guitar Hero franchise prior to the album being finalized. This video demonstrates easily how the final product sounds gross compared to the Guitar Hero version.

Ted Jensen, Senior mastering engineer at Sterling Sound who oversaw ‘Death Magnetic’ responded to severe crticism leveled at him about the audio quality. ’I’m certainly sympathetic to your reaction, I get to slam my head against that brick wall every day. In this case the mixes were already brick walled before they arrived at my place. Suffice it to say I would never be pushed to overdrive things as far as they are here. Believe me I’m not proud to be associated with this one, and we can only hope that some good will come from this in some form of backlash against volume above all else’.

The increasing trend away from high fidelity dynamic range material towards a wash of sheer volume is effectively detailed in the following graph of remasters of Michael Jackson’s ‘Black & White’ track. This is exactly the same song, simply remastered by engineers over the years for different re-releases featuring the song. As you’ll see, the song gets louder with each subsequent release, yet the audio graph begins to more closely resemble the ‘bricj wall’ appearance that is the bain of main quality sound engineers.

The end result is that for the last 15 years music quality has degraded to the point where an entire generation is accepting bad recordings without realizing that a much better audio production standard exists, Simply put, music is becoming less musical, and an increasing number of music fans are unaware.

To discover more about the Loudness Wars, visit the following website.

www.DynamicRangeDay.com