Tech: January 2008 Archives

Have you ever wondered why music sucks so bad these days? Do you find that your tolerance for music by Ricky Martin and Green Day is pretty low? Well, there's a reason for that. We used to be audiophiles. If like myself you were alive and listening carefully in the great Age of High Fidelity, you experienced music that was much more dynamic and was delivered to you through equipment that was designed to provide you with faithful sound reproduction. Today we listen to dynamically flat music that's delivered to us via crappy, digitally compressed MP3's via tiny headphones or computer speakers. The best sound system that the average young person owns in probably in his/her car, and a car is not the best environment for audio fidelity even if its stereo is top of the line. But why does that make the music suck and who's to blame?

Music engineers have been waging what is known as "The Loudness War". Engineers diminish the dynamic range with a compression technique which reduces the difference between the softest and loudest sounds of a musical piece. The process is illustrated in this clip. It's called mastering "hot" and the result is not only reduction in dynamic range, but also distortion and ultimately listener fatigue and even pain.

But why would audio engineers, the ultimate audiophiles, do this? Are they only the foot soldiers in this Loudness War, being forced into this by the producers, A&R guys and musicians?  Master Engineer Jerry Tubb explains, "Ours is a service business," Tubb says. "If that's what the client wants, I try to explain the trade-offs in clarity. In reality, we're just trying to accommodate requests from labels or A&R guys or the artists themselves. They'll walk in with a handful of CDs and say, 'I want it to be as loud as this one.' The last five years it's gone absolutely mad." So why all this pressure to master hot to begin with?

It has everything to do with the way we listen to music. Firstly, digital recording and playback have allowed this war to rage like never before. Dynamic range on vinyl records had to be carefully engineered to avoid the many pitfalls of the groove including distortion and keeping the needle from bouncing right off the record. CDs and MP3s don't have these limitations, thus the sky is the limit. Secondly, music today is being engineered with the Mp3/Ipod/car radio listener in mind. The loudness war is an effort to keep the music within the distracted, short attention span of today's listeners through their crappy little stereos and headphones. As consumers in the last couple of decades we have overwhelmingly chosen either cheap, low performance equipment like those crap all-in-one stereos that you get at Fail-Mart (which are just boomboxes without handles) or expensive but conveniently portable devices like Ipods. We usually listen to music while driving, exercising, blogging and whatever else it is we do except just sit and listen. Simply put, not many of us listeners are audiophiles any more. Thirdly, popular musicians these days seem to either not understand or care about dynamics anyway.  There's a dynamic of sound in the technical recording/reproduction sense, and there's also the dynamic attribute of the music itself, as in quiet parts and loud parts or soft instruments and loud instruments. Today's popular music seems to be written and played by people who themselves seem to prefer nothing but constant blaring guitars or synths, booming bass, banging drums, and wailing vocals. There's loud and louder. There's no subtlety anymore. The music on AOR classics like Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Queen's A Night at the Opera and just about any Steely Dan Album have dynamic range that is seldom attempted by musicians these days. Outside of the realm of classical music, which is by far the most dynamic music, the AOR of the 70's was the pinnacle of Hi-Fi. This of course indicates the possibility that I have just taken the "Old Fogey Stance" on this topic.  On the other hand, maybe the Classical listeners and the Pink Floyd loving stoners of the world are simply the last true audiophiles. NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!!!