Loudness War ... how loud is your music?

MikeEnRegalia wrote: ^ the website doesn't seem to feature any details about the study ... but nevermind. As the loudness war indicates: There is a trend towards louder albums. You can make them louder by using compression, but of course it also helps to make all the sections of a track equally loud. Again, I think that although this is a general trend, there are many exceptions.

you should be able to download a podcast of the program, Mike

it was only yesterday. that's why it is so present in my mind


Edited by BaldJean - June 06 2008 at 16:25

I meant the second. and this is only done for the silent parts, not for the loud ones, so this has nothing to do with compression at all.
I do not have the study here; I only heard about it in the radio. if you are interested in it then you will have to write to the radio station WDR 3 and ask about it; the topic was talked about in a program called "Resonanzen". I am pretty sure they could give you more detailed information there about how to get at the results of the study

BaldJean wrote: this is NOT about compression

This movie is a good demonstration of what the loudness war is about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

@BaldJean: Which study? All the other studies and wikipedia pages I read say that the loudness is increasing ... this is what the terms "loudness war" and "loudness race" are all about. But perhaps we mean the same thing ... by moving the silent sounds closer to the loud sounds (decreasing the dynamic range) the whole signal becomes louder, because the louder parts are boosted too.

@oliverstoned: On the contrary. It is digital recording technology which has increased the possible dynamic range of recordings to as much as 144dB (DVD-Audio). The music industry is to blame, because they're not using the technology to create better sounding music, but to cater it for low quality playback devices instead.

BaldJean wrote: MikeEnRegalia wrote: Calculating the replay gain is a convenient way of finding out how loud a track is - it calculates the root mean square of the loudness (dBFS). I agree that modern productions tend to be louder, but of course there are many exceptions.  they are not louder in general, they are simply less dynamic. the loud sounds still are as loud as they used to be, but the quiet sounds have been made louder, though this is totally unnecessary. one album this was tested with was the latest reissue of "Sergeant Pepper's", by the way. it was compared to older versions which were more dynamic

Another issue which shows the disaster that digital is for music reproduction. Most of the recent remasters are crap.

in fact the loud sounds have also become louder. The signal is more compressed - there's less "distance" between quiet and loud sound - and the average loudness is also increasing. If you ripped both the first CD release and the latest reissue of the album to your hard drive (mp3) and calculated the replay gain of both albums, the latter one would probably have a more negative value, meaning that you would have to attenuate volume to achieve equal loudness.

Calculating the replay gain is a convenient way of finding out how loud a track is - it calculates the root mean square of the loudness (dBFS). I agree that modern productions tend to be louder, but of course there are many exceptions. 

^ true, but if an album is mastered to be really loud and contains aggressive drumming, you can be sure that there's heavy compression or even clipping in the drum sounds. But it doesn't have to sound bad - it's actually possible to emulate analog compression and then run the result of that through a brick wall limiter. That way, the result will be heavily compressed but there won't be any "cut-off" waveforms. But of course no matter how you do it, artificially increasing the loudness will always introduce distortion.