Have you ever wondered why music seems to matter less and less in your life these days? Do you remember the albums you listened to as a kid, and how you knew every lyric and how you’d anticipate one song starting after the last? How you’d hide under the duvet with a crappy radio to get a fix on the latest chart hits? That feeling of emmersion as your favourite song kicked-in on your Dansette record player? Ok, I’m showing my age here, but my latest theory for my own waning interest in music isn’t to do with the rise of MP3, the demise of vinyl or the relatively new distraction of the internet. No, I reckon a lot of it is down to this: it all sounds crap.
Let me elaborate - I’m talking about the so-called ‘Loudness Wars’. In case you don’t know, there’s been a trend in the music industry for the last ten years or so to make records sound ‘louder’. I put ‘louder’ in quotes because, as you and I know, we use the volume knob on our stereos to make stuff sound louder or softer depending on whether the neighbours are in, so how can you make a record louder? Answer: it’s all relative. Record companies want their track to sound louder than the last one, they want their track to stand-out from the rest of your playlist on your iPod, they want their track to blast out of MySpace or iTunes. Loud = good, it stands out, it’s what the kids want.
The problem is, there’s only so far you can go making something relatively louder before something has to give, and that something is quality of sound. Dynamic range is the difference between the loud and soft bits of any one track, and this is the first thing to go when you start pumping up the levels - the loud bits are as loud as they can go, so the soft bits are pushed up until they’re practically the same. The upshot? Music that is devoid of life, of light and dark, music that is well on the way to becoming a wall of distorted noise. Any subtlety is lost, after a few minutes your ears are tired and you’re getting a headache. In the old days you’d turn up the volume and you’d discover new depths as the bass came alive and previously concealed detail would jump out of your speakers. Turn up your average track now and it’s painful - it sounds aggressive and tiring. It sounds like your stereo is on the way out. Didn’t it used to sound better than this?
MP3 and CD formats are not to blame in themselves. They are both capable of fantastic reproduction of music when used correctly. It’s a case of rubbish-in, rubbish-out. The loudness war has escalated to such an extent that fans are starting to rebel about the poor quality of their favourite band’s material. Metallica fans found their voice recently when the band’s album Death Magnetic turned-out sounding like a wasp trapped in a jam jar. Interestingly a version of one song that was used on the Guitar Hero game sounded loads better, which pointed the finger at the latter stages of the album’s production and mastering (mastering is the final stage of processing an album where ‘loudness’ adjustments are often made).
In the end the market will decide, but for those of us that like to listen to good, well-recorded music, let’s help that process along. Check out www.dynamicrange.de. Google it - educate yourself. Tell people what they’re missing and why pop and rock doesn’t seem to be what it used to be. Let’s reclaim the music!
Tags: loudness wars, music