Recent thoughts about music: The Loudness War

(DISCLAIMER, added May 4, 2012, and this applies to all my Loudness War related entries: I don't have access to the actual masters of any recordings I refer to, so some statements might be inaccurate.)

I've been wanting to do an entry about The Loudness War since I started this "thoughts about music" series, but haven't exactly known what to do with it, or what aspects to discuss. There are plenty of articles and videos that do a good job of explaining the history and technical aspects of it, so what do I have to add to the discussion? Some anecdotal evidence and waveform pictures, that's what!

I used to think that louder CDs were better. Then I read the Rolling Stone article The Death Of High Fidelity, and I realized that really loud CDs actually sounded like crap. Almost a year after I had read the article, I came across a perfect example of how crappy modern mastered music was compared to decently mastered music. I went to a friend's DJ gig at a bar, and the first two songs he played were some old songs from Parliament and Morris Day & The Time. The music was LOUD, but it sounded pretty good. Later on, he played Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl", and it sounded really harsh and headache inducing. It was obvious to me that the dynamic range of it was squashed all to Hell. Never minding the lossy compression (which is different from Dynamic Range Compression) of YouTube videos, you can probably recreate this experiment at home. Put on a Parliament video, crank it up to a loud (but comfortable) level, then put on Katy Perry, and try not to turn it down. :)

I wonder sometimes if I use the Loudness War as a convenient excuse to ignore new music, remembering that there were plenty of CDs on my "Favorites of the 2000s" list that were terribly compressed. Then I remember some of those CDs that might have been more fun to listen to had they not been so squashed. Take for example Weezer's "Maladroit". Here is a picture of the first single, "Dope Nose":

SMASH! Let's compare that to a prime slice of Power Pop of similar length from Urge Overkill's awesome 1993 album "Saturation", a track called "Woman 2 Woman":

Do you see all those spikes above and below the solid blue parts? That's a good thing! Now let's take a look at something else that's well mastered and fun to listen to, "Trash", from The New York Dolls' classic 1973 self titled debut. This seems to have no compression at all in the mastering stage:

In 2006, surviving NY Dolls members David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain reunited and released a new record, "One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This." I bought it in October of that year, mostly on the strength of "Dance Like A Monkey", and was slightly disappointed with the album as a whole. I listened to it a few times, then basically put it away, giving it another try the following Spring or Summer. I enjoyed it quite a bit more then, it's a much better Spring/Summer record than a Fall/Winter record. Some other things that would have made it better would have been if they had called the band something other than The New York Dolls, and if they had taken a couple of tracks off, namely the slower ones. Years later, I realized that it also would've been a hell of a lot more fun to listen to had they not compressed it so bad. Take a look at one of the songs that is closer in spirit to the old Dolls, "Gimmie Luv & Turn On The Light."

If you think that looks bad, then you ought to hear it! Again, you can probably look these up on YouTube and get an idea of how they sound.

One thing that I've discovered in all my research is that there is more to the problem than just compression/limiting in the mastering stage. On more recent recordings, some problems are caused by recording too loud, most others are caused by jacking up all the levels in the mix and/or compressing in the mixing stage. I wish I could say I was an expert at differentiating just plain loud mixes from those masters that are heavily compressed, but I'm not. I have a lot of CDs from the early 1990s that are really compressed, the main differences between these older CDs and the Loudness War victims are that the older CDs used analog compressors, and they usually left about a decibel of space above the main peaks of the music to give the music some "breathing room" as well as avoid clipping. What really got the Loudness War rolling was the mass production of digital brickwall limiters. The modern day Loudness War is generally considered to have started full bore with Oasis's 1995 album, "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?". I don't currently own it, so I can't make my own examples from it, and using the tracks from it that are on my "Stop The Clocks" compilation wouldn't be fair because they're supposedly even more compressed than on the original album. The only decent waveform from that album that I could find online was on this guy's Loudness War blog entry. (Check him out, he's basically from my generation, and seems to have the same angst about modern music as I do.) His waveform was for a ballad called "Cast No Shadow". I listened to it on YouTube, the song is entirely too quiet to have such a squashed waveform. But it's definitely not the first example of brickwalling. While the Wikipedia Loudness War entry says that digital brickwall limiters went into mass production in 1994, the earliest example of true brickwalling in my collection is from Guns n' Roses' "The Spaghetti Incident?", which came out on November 23, 1993. Check out their cover of The Stooges' "Raw Power".

A lot of brickwalled CDs were released in 1994, but most of them were fairly tasteful compared to what came later. That year, Oasis released "Definitely Maybe", and according to a lot of people it's almost as bad, if not as bad, as "Morning Glory." A few months before "Morning Glory", Fear Factory released "Demanufacture", which is probably my second most brickwalled looking (but not loudest!) pre-"Morning Glory" CD. Check out the track "Zero Signal" below.

Here is what "Zero Signal" looks like from the Mortal Kombat soundtrack. I don't know if any compression was applied, or if it's just a really loud mix. Whatever it is, it's more reminiscent of some of those loud Metal CDs I have from the early half of the 1990s. If this is an accurate snapshot of the mix that George Marino had to work with when mastering "Demanufacture", then I'd say that he didn't have much to compress, and he actually did a decent job. (Sorry, I realized that I was definitely talking out my ass, but decided to leave it and strike through it rather than deleting it.) It's very compressed, but uses a very different kind of compression than the "Demanufacture" version. I'm not sure how these were done, but the Mortal Kombat version looks something like plain old (yet heavy) Compression, while the Demanufacture version looks like it was Hard Limited. I'm not really sure which I like better.

I almost wish I still had my "Demanufacture" remaster just to compare these with. "Demanufacture" is loud enough that it really didn't need a remaster, which is why I eventually sold it. And honestly, the original is not that bad sounding.

To be continued...