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I am adding this here because, of all forms of music, I have no idea how the loudness war was ever part of prog rock. I assume that people who like prog, tend to like great sound, so would be turned off by brick wall mastering and terrible sounding music, when it is caused by some idiot crushing the sound in to a distorted or nasty sounding wall. I have rarely seen reviews even mentioning this problem, when describing an album.
Could the loudness thing be a big reason for the obvious reverence for 70s music? Those albums didn't get destroyed in some mastering studio.
People often listened to music in the background until the 1990s. Then it became as loved as second hand smoke. Why? Ears
and brains developed over millions of years and have become insanely
clever at recognising sound, frequencies and noise levels and people
love it.
Music producers developed
skills over a few years and have successfully removed all subtlety and
natural detail from recorded music, to the point where people don't like
the sound of it in the background any more!
In
the early days of pop music, parents complained about the noisy racket
that young bands made. Strangely enough, they didn't turn it off. Why?
Even
tho electric guitars and keyboards are "fake" one could argue, they
still produced natural sound. Loud bits, soft bits, pins dropping and
dense bits in an interesting way. So the result was never nasty, even to
grandparents.
So! You may be wondering why I claim that music tends to sound "nasty" now and who started it?
Advertisers!!!
Yes.
They started it a long time ago. They want their ads to be louder than
the tv program you are watching, so you may notice it and buy something.
You've all heard this? Yes!
TV
programs are already as loud as it is possible to be, so the tech guys
figured out how to get the average volume of adverts higher, with a
slight loss of quality. Job done!
TV programs and movies did NOT want to reduce quality and didn't need to compete.
Record
companies and band managers DO compete and clearly have no real
interest in the sound, only the earnings they get from music.
The
effect on a lot of music is that the loud bits are not any louder than
before because that is impossible but the soft bits are MUCH louder.
Producing a wall of loud, which can sound pretty good to the dedicated
fan but bloody awful to anyone else.
It is easy to conclude that TV sound or music made before the 1990s is nicer in the backgound as "company", than anything newer.
Almost
nobody is aware of what this "loudness" thing means or even that it
exists. I started noticing many years ago, that I liked certain albums
but something about them sounded wrong. I liked the albums, so ignored
it. Some think that vinyl sounds nicer than CDs and I assumed that was
the reason. Trouble is that I used cassettes also and they also sounded
nice. I tested by recording a vinyls and a CDs of the same albums on to
cassettes and the vinyl recordings sounded better. I also found that a
cassette recorded from vinyl, sounded better than an actual CD and that
is completely crazy.
CDs are technically better than vinyl and way better than cassettes.
They have more dynamic range, so it's obvious!
Read more about the loudness war insanity here:
http://productionadvice.co.uk/category/loudness/" rel="nofollow - http://productionadvice.co.uk/category/loudness/
It
is likely that the loudness war is ending at last. Volume levelers on
youtube, spotify and everywhere else are now making it pointless, also
laws controlling ads on TV etc.
At
the moment, if you are a band reading this, you probably STILL are
making your album LOUD and I mean producing a dynamic range even lower
than 8 in mastering. STOP IT!
It sounds horrible.
It also has the effect of making sure that you won't get discovered because nobody likes second hand smoke.
PS: Prediction
Producers
will soon start the new trend in remastering albums, 1000s of them, to
be dynamic. They earned a lot of money ruining music and now they can
earn it all over again by remastering the albums they remastered before.
You gotta laugh eh?
PS again: I love smoke.
PS3: I love music insanely loud and always did!
PS4: Just one last thing.
The new Corvus Stone single will have a DR of at least 11. How do I know this?
http://www.corvusstone.com/blogstone/is-music-now-the-new-second-hand-smoke" rel="nofollow - http://www.corvusstone.com/blogstone/is-music-now-the-new-second-hand-smoke
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http://www.corvusstone.com
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