Stop loudness war

The loudness war or loudness race is a pejorative term for the apparent competition to digitally master and release recordings with increasing loudness.The phenomenon was first reported with respect to mastering practices for 7" singles. The maximum peak level of analog recordings such as these is limited by the specifications of electronic equipment along the chain from source to listener, including vinyl record and cassette players.

With the advent of the Compact Disc (CD), music is encoded to a digital format with a clearly defined maximum peak amplitude. Once the maximum amplitude of a CD is reached, loudness can be increased still further through signal processing techniques such as dynamic range compression and equalizaion. Engineers can apply an increasingly high ratio of compression to a recording until it more frequently peaks at the maximum amplitude. Extreme uses of dynamic range compression can introduce clipping and other audible distortion. Modern albums that use such extreme dynamic range compression therefore sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as "victims of the loudness war".

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 and when 7" singles were played on jukebox machines in clubs and bars. Jukeboxes were often set to a pre-determined level by the bar owner, yet any record that was mastered "hotter" than the others before or after it would gain the attention of the crowd. The song would stand out. 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 that 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 computer-based 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 level of an audio signal with no delay (hardware equivalents have a short delay caused by processing time).

1980s

The stages of the CDs 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 late 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 would show the shortcomings of higher recording levels.

As a result, the common practice of mastering music involved matching the highest peak of a recording at, or close to, digital full scale, and referring to digital levels along the lines of more familiar analog VU meters. When using VU meters, a certain point (usually −14 dB below the disc's maximum amplitude) was used in the same way as the saturation point (signified as 0 dB) of analog recording, with several dB of the CD's 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 0 dBFS. The average level of the average rock song during most of the decade was around −18 dBFS.

1990s

In the early 1990s, CDs with music louder level began to surface, and CD levels became more and more likely to bump up to the digital limitresulting in recordings where the peaks on an average rock or beat-heavy pop CD hovered near 0 dB but only occasionally reached it.

The concept of making music releases "hotter" began to appeal to people within the industry, in part because of how noticeably louder releases had become and also in part because the industry believed that customers preferred louder sounding CDs, even though that notion might not have been true.Engineers, musicians and labels each developed their own ideas of how CDs could be made louder.] In 1994, the digital brickwall limiter with look-ahead (to pull down peak levels before they happened) was first mass-produced. While the increase in CD loudness was gradual throughout the 1990s, some opted to push the format to the limit, such as on Oasis's widely popular album (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, which averaged −8 dBFS on many of its tracks—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 that, to this day, is arguably the loudest rock CD ever recorded. It has an average of −4 dBFS in places.

2000s

Loud mastering practices caught media attention in 2008 with the release of Metallica's Death Magnetic album. The CD version of the recording has a high average loudness that pushes peaks beyond the point of digital clipping, resulting in distortion. These findings were reported by customers and music industry professionals. These findings were later covered in multiple international publications, including Rolling Stone,The Wall Street Journal,ABC Radio,Wired,and The Guardian.Ted Jensen, a mastering engineer involved in the Death Magnetic recordings, subsequently criticized the approach employed during the production process.A version of the release without dynamic range compression was included in the downloadable content for Guitar Hero III.

In contrast, in late 2008 mastering engineer Bob Ludwig offered three versions of the Guns N' Roses album Chinese Democracy for approval to co-producers Axl Rose and Caram Costanzo, and they selected the one with the least compression. Ludwig wrote, "I was floored when I heard they decided to go with my full dynamics version and the loudness-for-loudness-sake versions be damned."Ludwig feels that the "fan and press backlash against the recent heavily compressed recordings finally set the context for someone to take a stand and return to putting music and dynamics above sheer level."

2010s

In March 2010, mastering engineer Ian Shepherd organised the first Dynamic Range Day, a day of online activity intended to raise awareness of the issue and promote the idea that "Dynamic music sounds better". The day was a modest success and its follow-up in 2011 built on this, gaining industry support from companies like SSL, Bowers & Wilkins and Shure as well as "name" engineers like Bob Ludwig. Shepherd cites research showing there is no connection between sales and "loudness", and that people prefer more dynamic music.

With music sales moving towards digital downloads and away from CDs, there is a possibility that the loudness war will be blunted by normalization technology such as ReplayGain and Apple's Sound Check. Some cloud -based music services perform loudness normalization by default and may reduce the market pressure to hypercompress material.

Other proposals include the use of dynamic range expansion such as a system proposed by DTS which aims at restoring transients that have previously been reduced in dynamic range.