David Bendeth, a producer who works withrock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that thealbums he makes are often played through tiny computer speakers byfans who are busy surfing the Internet. so he’s not surprised whenrecord labels ask the mastering engineers who work on his CDs tocrank up the sound levels so high that even the soft parts soundloud.
Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recordingtechnology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed andmastered — almost always for the worse. “They make it loud toget [listeners'] attention,” Bendeth says. Engineers do that byapplying dynamic range compression, which reduces the differencebetween the loudest and softest sounds in a song. like many of hispeers, Bendeth believes that relying too much on this effect canobscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power and leavelisteners with what engineers call ear fatigue. “I think mosteverything is mastered a little too loud,” Bendeth says. “Theindustry decided that it’s a volume contest.”
Producers and engineers call this “the loudness war,” and it haschanged the way almost every new pop and rock album sounds. Butvolume isn’t the only issue. Computer programs like Pro Tools,which let audio engineers manipulate sound the way a word processoredits text, make musicians sound unnaturally perfect. and today’slisteners consume an increasing amount of music on MP3, whicheliminates much of the data from the original CD file and can leavemusic sounding tinny or hollow. “With all the technical innovation,music sounds worse,” says Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, who has madewhat are considered some of the best-sounding records of all time.”God is in the details. But there are no details anymore.”
The idea that engineers make albumslouder might seem strange: Isn’t volume controlled by that knob onthe stereo? Yes, but every setting on that dial delivers a range ofloudness, from a hushed vocal to a kick drum — and pushingsounds toward the top of that range makes music seem louder. It’sthe same technique used to make television commercials stand outfrom shows. and it does grab listeners’ attention — but at aprice. Last year, Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone that modernalbums “have sound all over them. There’s no definition of nothing,no vocal, no nothing, just like — static.”
In 2004, Jeff Buckley’s mom, Mary Guibert, listened to theoriginal three-quarter-inch tape of her son’s recordings as she waspreparing the tenth-anniversary reissue of Grace. “We werehearing instruments you’ve never heard on that album, like fingercymbals and the sound of viola strings being plucked,” sheremembers. “It blew me away because it was exactly what he heard inthe studio.”
To Guibert’s disappointment, the remastered 2004 version failed tocapture these details. so last year, when Guibert assembled thebest-of collection So Real: Songs from Jeff Buckley, sheinsisted on an independent A&R consultant to oversee thereissue process and a mastering engineer who would reproduce thesound Buckley made in the studio. “You can hear the distinctinstruments and the sound of the room,” she says of the newrelease. “Compression smudges things together.”
Too much compression can be heard as musical clutter; on theArctic Monkeys’ debut, the band never seems to pause to catch itsbreath. By maintaining constant intensity, the album flattens outthe emotional peaks that usually stand out in a song. “You lose thepower of the chorus, because it’s not louder than the verses,”Bendeth says. “You lose emotion.”
The inner ear automatically compresses blasts of high volume toprotect itself, so we associate compression with loudness, saysDaniel Levitin, a professor of music and neuroscience at McGillUniversity and author of This is your Brain on Music: TheScience of a Human Obsession. Human brains have evolved to payparticular attention to loud noises, so compressed sounds initiallyseem more exciting. But the effect doesn’t last. “The excitement inmusic comes from variation in rhythm, timbre, pitch and loudness,”Levitin says. “If you hold one of those constant, it can seemmonotonous.” After a few minutes, research shows, constant loudnessgrows fatiguing to the brain. though few listeners realize thisconsciously, many feel an urge to skip to another song.
“If you limit range, it’s just an assault on the body,” says TomCoyne, a mastering engineer who has worked with Mary J. Blige andNas. “When you’re fifteen, it’s the greatest thing — you’rebeing hammered. But do you want that on a whole album?”
To an average listener, a wide dynamic range creates a sense ofspaciousness and makes it easier to pick out individual instruments— as you can hear on recent albums such as Dylan’s ModernTimes and Norah Jones’ Not too Late. “When people have the courageand the vision to do a record that way, it sets them apart,” saysJoe Boyd, who produced albums by Richard Thompson and R.E.M.’sFables of the Reconstruction. “It sounds warm, it soundsthree-dimensional, it sounds different. Analog sound to me is moreemotionally affecting.”
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Rock and pop producers have always usedcompression to balance the sounds of different instruments and tomake music sound more exciting, and radio stations applycompression for technical reasons. In the days of vinyl rec- ords,there was a physical limit to how high the bass levels could gobefore the needle skipped a groove. CDs can handle higher levels ofloudness, although they, too, have a limit that engineers call”digital zero dB,” above which sounds begin to distort. Pop albumsrarely got close to the zero-dB mark until the mid-1990s, whendigital compressors and limiters, which cut off the peaks of soundwaves, made it easier to manipulate loudness levels. Intenselycompressed albums like Oasis’ 1995 (What’s the Story) MorningGlory? set a new bar for loudness; the songs were well-suitedfor bars, cars and other noisy environments. “In the Seventies andEighties, you were expected to pay attention,” says Matt Serletic,the former chief executive of Virgin Records USA, who also producedalbums by Matchbox Twenty and Collective Soul. “Modern music shouldbe able to get your attention.” Adds Rob Cavallo, who producedGreen Day’s American Idiot and My Chemical Romance’sThe Black Parade, “It’s a style that started post-grunge,to get that intensity. the idea was to slam someone’s face againstthe wall. You can set your CD to stun.”
It’s not just new music that’s too loud. Many remasteredrecordings suffer the same problem as engineers apply compressionto bring them into line with modern tastes. the new Led Zeppelincollection, Mothership, is louder than the band’s originalalbums, and Bendeth, who mixed Elvis Presley’s 30 #1 Hits,says that the album was mastered too loud for his taste. “A lot ofaudiophiles hate that record,” he says, “but people can play it inthe car and it’s competitive with the new Foo Fighters record.”
Just as cds supplanted vinyl andcassettes, MP3 and other digital-music formats are quicklyreplacing CDs as the most popular way to listen to music. Thatmeans more conven- ience but worse sound. To create an MP3, acomputer samples the music on a CD and compresses it into a smallerfile by excluding the musical information that the human ear isless likely to notice. Much of the information left out is at thevery high and low ends, which is why some MP3s sound flat. Cavallosays that MP3s don’t reproduce reverb well, and the lack ofhigh-end detail makes them sound brittle. Without enough low end,he says, “you don’t get the punch anymore. It decreases the punchof the kick drum and how the speaker gets pushed when the guitaristplays a power chord.”
But not all digital-music files are created equal. Levitin saysthat most people find MP3s ripped at a rate above 224 kbpsvirtually indistinguishable from CDs. (iTunes sells music as either128 or 256 kbps AAC files — AAC is slightly superior to MP3at an equivalent bit rate. Amazon sells MP3s at 256 kbps.) still,”it’s like going to the Louvre and instead of the Mona Lisa there’sa 10-megapixel image of it,” he says. “I always want to listen tomusic the way the artists wanted me to hear it. I wouldn’t look ata Kandinsky painting with sunglasses on.”
Producers also now alter the way they mix albums to compensate forthe limitations of MP3 sound. “You have to be aware of how peoplewill hear music, and pretty much everyone is listening to MP3,”says producer Butch Vig, a member of Garbage and the producer ofNirvana’s Never- mind. “Some of the effects get lost. so yousometimes have to over-exaggerate things.” Other producers believethat intensely compressed CDs make for better MP3s, since theloudness of the music will compensate for the flatness of thedigital format.
As technological shifts have changed the way sounds arerecorded, they have encouraged an artificial perfection in musicitself. Analog tape has been replaced in most studios by Pro Tools,making edits that once required splicing tape together easily donewith the click of a mouse. Programs like Auto-Tune can make weaksingers sound pitch-perfect, and Beat Detective does the same thingfor wobbly drummers.
“You can make anyone sound professional,” says Mitchell Froom, aproducer who’s worked with Elvis Costello and Los Lobos, amongothers. “But the problem is that you have something that’sprofessional, but it’s not distinctive. I was talking to a sessiondrummer, and I said, ‘When’s the last time you could tell who thedrummer is?’ You can tell Keith Moon or John Bonham, but now theyall sound the same.”
So is music doomed to keep soundingworse? Awareness of the problem is growing. the South by Southwestmusic festival recently featured a panel titled “Why does Today’sMusic Sound like Shit?” In August, a group of producers andengineers founded an organization called Turn me Up!, whichproposes to put stickers on CDs that meet high sonic standards.
But even most CD listeners have lost interest in high-endstereos as surround-sound home theater systems have become morepopular, and superior-quality disc formats like DVD-Audio and SACDflopped. Bendeth and other producers worry that young listenershave grown so used to dynamically compressed music and the thinsound of MP3s that the battle has already been lost. “CDs soundbetter, but no one’s buying them,” he says. “The age of theaudiophile is over.”
(On the next page: top artists andproducers sound off on the sound wars. Plus: Check out waveforms tosee what dynamic compression looks like, and more.)
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Sounding Off on the Sound Wars: TopProducers and Artists Speak Out
This is what I think is happening: Everybody has iPods, so youcan’t get them that loud. so they have a algorithm called a”finalizer” — it’s not that new, but the way people are usingit is new — and it makes your music sound louder. People willruin their records and CDs. I was really stunned by the CD the guygave me when I listened to it at home — it sounded crazy! Itwas like, abort mission! Supposedly it sounds fine on your iPod,but if you take the CD and put it on your hi-fi CD player you canhear the digital clipping. It’s a big news story over inEngland.”
— Kim Deal, on mastering the new Breeders album, MountainBattles
“Compression is a necessary evil. the artists I know want tosound competitive. You don’t want your track to sound quieter orwimpier by comparison. We’ve raised the bar and you can’t reallystep back.”
— Butch Vig, producer and Garbagemastermind
“We’re conforming to the way machines pay music. It’s robots’choice. It used to be ladies’ choice — now it’s robots’choice.”
— Donald Fagen, producer and Steely Danfrontman
“I believe that if a vocalist is hyper-tuned, it’s lesspersonal. I have no aversion to using Auto-Tune when I have to. ButI think listeners can hear it.”
— Brendan O’Brien, producer of Pearl Jam,Rage Against the Machine and Bruce Springtseen’s TheRising and Magic
“I think there’s been a huge shift in how people listen tomusic. They used to get as good a stereo as they could. now theywant an iPod. and the audiophiles have moved on to multimedia. Butto get the content to people, you have to play by theirrules.”
— Matt Serletic, Matchbox Twenty andCollective Soul producer and former chief executive, VirginRecords
“A&R people like the compressed aesthetic because they cantake it to the radio. They think if they want to have a hit recordthey have to spend a lot of money so they want to cover themselves.But if you think about the classic records, none of them aresquashed.”
— Mitchell Froom, producer of albums by LosLobos, Elvis Costello and others
“I find it quite interesting, and I think its instructive, thatif you focus on one area of the music business — you couldgenerally call it music for people over twenty-four — and youlook at the last ten years and look at records that have come outof nowhere, that no one’s putting any money behind and have takesoff, the two things that come to mind are the Buena Vista SocialClub and Norah Jones. and those records were made in the mostold-fashioned ways you can imagine.” — JoeBoyd, producer of several Richard Thompson albums andR.E.M.’s Fables of the Reconstruction
“I cant tell you how many times someone comes in and plays mesomething he wants mastered and I’ll say, ‘Do you want to make itslamming loud or retain some of this great sound?’ They’ll say, ‘Wewant to keep it really pristine.’ Then the next day they’ll call meand say, ‘How come mine isn’t as loud as so and so’s?’ “
— Bernie Grundman, mastering engineer
“With the Beatles or Rolling Stones, they’d be a little sharp orflat, but no one would care — that was rock. now if someone’sout of tune or out of time, they treat it as a mistake and correctit.”
— Ted Jensen, mastering engineer
(On the next page: a look at whatcompressed waveforms look like. Plus: Links to loudness resourceson the Web and a list of tracks where you can hear the differencefor yourself.)
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Loudness War
Since the mid-1990s, engineers have used dynamic compression tomake CDs louder and louder. these waveforms show how loudcontemporary recordings have become:
Nirvana
“Smells like TeenSpirit”
Back in 1991, even the loudest rock wasn’t always loud: “SmellsLike Teen Spirit” has plenty of fluctuations in its volume —so when Kurt Cobain screams, you feel it.
Arctic Monkeys
“I Bet You look good on theDancefloor”
This 2006 track is a prime offender: the sound wave is cranked tothe limit, and it stays there for nearly every second of the song.Have a headache yet?
U2
“With or Without You”(Original)
U2
“With or Without You”(Remastered)
How does MP3 work?
MP3 reduces a CD audio file’s size by as much as ninety percent,with an algorithm that eliminates sounds listeners are least likelyto perceive — including extremes of high and lowfrequencies.
What is dynamic range compression?
This studio effect reduces the difference between the loud and softparts of a piece of music — recently, mastering engineershave used it to make sure every moment on a CD is as loud aspossible.
Want to see more? make your own waveform comparisons andsend the images to us here. We’ll make a galleryand post in on RollingStone.com.
(On the next page: Links to loudnessresources on the Net. Plus: a list of tracks that’ll let you hearhow dynamic range has changed.)
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Planet of Sound: Loudness Resources on theWeb
Turn me Up!
This organization of producers and audio engineers wants toencourage artists to bring dynamic range back to music bycertifying albums that comply with certain standards.
“The Loudness War,” a YouTube video
This video explains why dynamic range matters in terms anyone canunderstand.
Loudness War entry, Wikipedia
The Wikipedia entry on the “Loudness War” has solid, if slightlytechnical information about the conditions that have led artistsand labels to limit the dynamic range of their music.
“Everything Louder than everything else,”Austin 360
This informative and well-written article was one of the first toaddress the lack of dynamic range in the mainstream media.
“Imperfect Sound forever,” Stylus
This magazine article about the “Loudness War” is full ofinteresting examples.
“Over the Limit,” Prorec.com
This informative article uses graphics of waveforms from five Rushalbums to illustrate the decline of dynamic range.
(On the next page: from Dylan to FallOut Boy, a list of tracks that’ll let you hear how dynamic rangehas changed.)
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Hear It for Yourself
Here are three recent albums noted for their depth and dynamicrange — and three that are way too loud
GOOD
Modern Times, Bob Dylan [Listen]
Not too Late, Norah Jones [Listen]
Raising Sand, Robert Plant/Alison Krauss [Listen]
On these albums, the music breathes: Check out the true-to-lifesound of Dylan’s “Thunder on the Mountain.”
BAD
Alright, Still Lily Allen [Listen]
Californication, Red Hot Chili Peppers
Infinity on High, Fall out Boy [Listen]
These are so unrelentingly loud that the sound is nearly distorted.the choruses on the Peppers’ “Scar Tissue” are no louder than theverses.
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Music News
dynamic range compression, emotional power, loudness war, music, paramore, producers
(Mar 22, 2010)
Digital music player maker Creative Technology has asked a US court to ban Apple from selling or marketing its iconic iPods in the US.
Linux Articles
Experience Hendrix, LLC in partnership with Sony Legacy inked an exclusive deal with ScatterTunes to re-release the partial catalog of Jimi Hendrix as well as his latest, ?Valleys of Neptune,” via their V-Album technology.
