Low-quality playback equipment. Mastering music correctly makes it sound "worse" on crappy hardware. But mastering it for crappy hardware makes it sound worse on quality speakers.
Some people backed the wrong horse. Much music exists mastered for old shitty car stereos and earbuds and the like. Sometimes, the original recordings are lost or nobody bothers to remaster them.
Yeah I got one of those „high end“ systems and some albums are just not made for quality speakers. Bands like metallica are sounding very bad on those speakers
Surprisingly, the first Korn album and the first RATM album sound great on high-end gear. And for what it's worth, Justice and the Black album do sound really good on quality equipment.
And if your equipment is really really good, you can even hear Jason on Justice :).
Hahaha yeah that is true. That is also one of the first thing I hear in a good recording. A well defined bass. Its crazy how on bad equipment and mixes the bass is only a static noise in the background
I've noticed this to be especially annoying with recordings that artificially inflate the bass. Yay for earbuds but it's a real pain in the ass when my car speakers rattle until I have to turn the sound down so low that road noise becomes an issue.
I like to listen to playlists on shuffle and the inconsistency between different albums has me fiddling with the bass on a song to song basis. Luckily my car has steering wheel controls for this. But most modern vehicles would have you fucking with a touch screen which is a non-starter while driving.
More detail: It's because different speaker construction techniques make for different frequency response curves - i.e. there's sounds a cheap speaker can't produce well, so music mastered for listening on commodity hardware of a bygone era sounds "compressed", because they squeeze all of the sound into a narrower band, so you could hear all of it.
The other replies aren't incorrect. But I think the main reason is out of fear that other music tracks sound louder in a club which would make them feel more exciting.
This is kind of repeating with playlists now. Not all services normalize perceived loudness across tracks (e.g. Spotify web player).
And related cause: A&R people listening to xyz's new album and judging it sounds "huge" / "phat" / "modern"... when actually it's just a bit louder than the other guys, but nobody's adjusting volumes between demos...
Am not an expert but... that doesn't show loudness difference to me. That shows dynamic range difference to me (even the Youtube description says they actually normalized the volume). I can hear the difference between the two version and how distorted the retail version is compared to the more clean sound of the GH3 version but it's not simply up to loudness.
Honestly maybe loudness war is a wrong term? Should be dynamic range war or compression war.
The final mastering/mixing has an avg db level they target. The more compressed mixes tend to have much louder avg db. Some of these modern "loud" mixes target -3db whereas the previous ones could be -10db or something. Played at an identical volume, the more compressed track will sound louder due to this target. Loudness war is an apt name. Just look at the sample waveforms on the wikipedia page:
The retail track was normalized. You can tell because the GH3 version has peaks that extend far past where the retail version cuts off.
I had trouble figuring that out at first because I thought that one of the tracks would be retail and the other would be GH3. What the video actually shows is the left and right channels of the edited together retail and GH3 tracks.
Not only is Rick Rubin's mix brickwalled, it's also riddled with clipping because he didn't even brickwall it correctly. It's one of very few albums I find unlistenable merely because of the mixing.
My personal thinking was that as there are more roads, cars, machines and industry since the 1940’s, records simply tried to continue to be audible when played so they HAD to increase volume. That is not the article’s explanation, however.
Also interesting how this war ended:
> Mastering engineer Bob Katz had argued that "The last battle of the loudness war has been won", claiming that mandatory use of Sound Check by Apple would lead to producers and mastering engineers to turn down the level of their songs to the standard level, or Apple will do it for them. He believed this would eventually result in producers and engineers making more dynamic masters to take account of this factor.
People can simply set the volume on the player louder if there's more background sounds. The trick to the loudness wars is to sound louder (than other songs) at the _same_ volume. If a bar or radio is in the background at a fixed volume, the loudest songs stand out.
"Loudness War" is a bit of a misnomer and this Wikipedia article is rather incoherent in its treatment of the phenomenon (which is real, but poorly explained here).
What controls how loud a piece of recorded music is playing at? The volume knob/buttons (depending on the device); or to put it another way, when you are playing the music for yourself, you control it. If you turn the knob all the way down it will be quiet, if you turn it all the way up, it will be loud. It is therefore trivial to play an album from 1950 louder than an album from 2020: if you want your 1950s jazz record to play louder than your 2020 metal record, the means for doing so is literally at your fingertips.
What has actually happened is that the dynamic range of recorded music has decreased. Dynamic range is the difference between the smallest and largest parts of the signal. Audio compressors reduce the peak amplitude of the signal and can also boost the weaker parts of the signal, so the effect is that the parts of music that were musically intended to be quieter start to sound just as loud as every other part in the music.
This does not mean that the actual volume of the sound coming out of your speakers is any greater, again, you control that with the volume knob. In fact, I would bet that the end result is that the parts of songs that are musically intended to be the loudest tend not to be emitted at as high a volume as they would be otherwise.
The reason for that: if a piece of music has quiet parts (especially at the beginning, as is common in intros), you tend to turn it up. Now that you have increased the total volume, when the loud/energetic part of the song comes on, it will be louder than it would have been had you not turned it up (obviously). If there are not quiet parts, then you never need to turn it up, and you will tend to listen to the music at a consistent level, thus avoiding the peaks of maximum volume that would have occurred had the music had more dynamic range.
This is also why this issue is most annoying when you are listening to a range of different music from different eras (e.g. an eclectic playlist), or, when your music is interspersed with ads. You will turn up music that has greater dynamic range, but then a heavily compressed song or ad will come on, and now your volume setting is much too high to listen to it comfortably.
Lastly, in terms of why: the louder music is, the better it tends to sound (up to a certain point of course). To really get the full experience of a piece of music, you need to listen to it fairly loud. So in an era of songs with plenty of dynamic range, people could make songs stand out by making them much louder by comparison. Once the dynamic range of everything has been ruined, however, this effect goes away and the end result is what you have today.
> The reason for that: if a piece of music has quiet parts (especially at the beginning, as is common in intros), you tend to turn it up.
With this you destroy the music. Maybe ok for your favorite Disco tune but but it turns Rock, Alternative and Classical music into crap That's why i cannot listen to classical music and some other music as mp3.
Volume is a pure measure of energy output, primarily controlled by a volume knob. Loudness is a psychoacoustic effect that measures our perception of loudness. Compressing the dynamic range of music makes it sound louder at all volumes, compared to music with a wider dynamic range.
So the loudness wars is an apt name. The deliberate compressions on music made the music sound louder, without people turning up the volume of the music, but in the process destroys any nuance in the music. Turning down the volume knob doesn’t reduce the effect in a meaningful way, sure it reduces the energy output of your speakers, but it won’t restore the nuance of the music, or eliminate clipped peaks where the music has exceeded the bit-depth of the digital carrier.
I'm curious whether you would agree with me that the article is muddled when, for instance, it includes this portion:
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A hearing researcher at House Ear Institute is concerned that the loudness of new albums could possibly harm listeners' hearing, particularly that of children.[48] The Journal of General Internal Medicine has published a paper suggesting increasing loudness may be a risk factor in hearing loss.[50][51]
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I assume that a "psychoacoustic effect" would not harm anyone's hearing, whereas volume - i.e. the measure of energy ouput - would, right? (And I know that agreeing with this statement doesn't invalidate your main point, I'm simply curious whether you agree with me that a reduction in dynamic range doesn't seem likely to harm anyone's hearing.)
In terms of your main point, I'm not sure I agree, but I really only have my own experience to draw upon, and am quite willing to concede the point. But to me, music with less dynamic range doesn't sound "louder", it sounds "more even", or something along those lines.
One of the things my wife does that drives me nuts when watching movies is she acts like a human compressor: she keeps the remote in her hand and turns down loud parts and turns up quiet parts. If I put the volume at a level that is appropriate, where quiet dialogue is audible but the loud parts (e.g. a car chase) are loud (as the filmmaker intended!) she will exclaim, "it's too loud!"
I offer this single anecdote as evidence that perhaps music with greater dynamic range can actually be perceived as louder, depending on the circumstances?
> I assume that a "psychoacoustic effect" would not harm anyone's hearing, whereas volume - i.e. the measure of energy ouput - would, right?
Not quite true. It’s a psychoacoustic effect because it’s something that can’t be observed outside of someone’s conscience, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a mechanical component to the effect.
Most importantly, the effect almost certainly has a substantial mechanical component that’s determined by how effectively your hearing system can couple sounds from your outer-ear into your inner-ear. Like all mechanical systems it’s transfer function is non-linear, it’s much better at coupling some frequencies that other frequencies.
If the compression done to the music is pushing the sound to in a frequency band that’s more strongly coupled, then energy output from the speaker might be the same, but the amount that ends up in your inner ear will increase, bringing with it higher chances of permanent damage.
Kind of sad for digital version of latest by Tears for Fears https://magicvinyldigital.net/2022/03/04/tears-for-fears-the... Its common for CDs in the 80s and early 90s to have DR12-DR14. Nowadays its only DR6-DR8. Why don't modern mastering engineers wake up to this regression?
- Showroom effect. You want to put your best foot forward when a consumer is only dipping in for a moment. Louder grabs attention harder.
- Crappy consumer stereo equipment. Low sensitivity, poor linearity, disposable earbuds and android phone speakers are the default. There's no room for nuance on those systems.
The high res version has a crappy DR, which is not expected, which means the only way to get a good digital version is to rip from vinyl. I understand the need to cater for low-end consumer equipment. It can be done by having good DR for vinyl , a good DR version for high-res Flac and physical Hybrid SACD and physical CD, and a loudness version for lossless/lossy streaming. It is safe to say most people who listen to Hybrid SACD/CD/High-Res Flac will have sufficient hi-fi equipments.
> Modern recordings that use extreme dynamic range compression and other measures to increase loudness therefore can sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as "victims of the loudness war."
I had some serious deja vu reading that as I knew I had head it before. Took me minute to find it but it's said (almost) verbatim at 0:23 seconds into this song [0] that was on a playlist I sometimes listen to.
Music has moved further away from the idea of the album since Loudness became a really big thing in the noughties. The one positive is that vinyl masters means that engineers have to consider some dynamics as a lot of albums since the mid 90s have been crushed
36 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 88.8 ms ] threadSome people backed the wrong horse. Much music exists mastered for old shitty car stereos and earbuds and the like. Sometimes, the original recordings are lost or nobody bothers to remaster them.
And if your equipment is really really good, you can even hear Jason on Justice :).
I do indeed remember how good it sounded. Also had a Sony Walkman, pretty good but nothing like a good furniture-size stereo.
I like to listen to playlists on shuffle and the inconsistency between different albums has me fiddling with the bass on a song to song basis. Luckily my car has steering wheel controls for this. But most modern vehicles would have you fucking with a touch screen which is a non-starter while driving.
This is kind of repeating with playlists now. Not all services normalize perceived loudness across tracks (e.g. Spotify web player).
And related cause: A&R people listening to xyz's new album and judging it sounds "huge" / "phat" / "modern"... when actually it's just a bit louder than the other guys, but nobody's adjusting volumes between demos...
Grab Metallica's Death Magnetic. Listen through it all the way.
Now find the Guitar Hero III remastered version of the same album, listen through it.
I guarantee you feel exhausted after the official master version, because there is no dynamic range, it's just a full spectrum of noise.
Here's a Youtube video visualising the difference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Nfqpr3ygSg
Honestly maybe loudness war is a wrong term? Should be dynamic range war or compression war.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
I had trouble figuring that out at first because I thought that one of the tracks would be retail and the other would be GH3. What the video actually shows is the left and right channels of the edited together retail and GH3 tracks.
Also interesting how this war ended:
> Mastering engineer Bob Katz had argued that "The last battle of the loudness war has been won", claiming that mandatory use of Sound Check by Apple would lead to producers and mastering engineers to turn down the level of their songs to the standard level, or Apple will do it for them. He believed this would eventually result in producers and engineers making more dynamic masters to take account of this factor.
What controls how loud a piece of recorded music is playing at? The volume knob/buttons (depending on the device); or to put it another way, when you are playing the music for yourself, you control it. If you turn the knob all the way down it will be quiet, if you turn it all the way up, it will be loud. It is therefore trivial to play an album from 1950 louder than an album from 2020: if you want your 1950s jazz record to play louder than your 2020 metal record, the means for doing so is literally at your fingertips.
What has actually happened is that the dynamic range of recorded music has decreased. Dynamic range is the difference between the smallest and largest parts of the signal. Audio compressors reduce the peak amplitude of the signal and can also boost the weaker parts of the signal, so the effect is that the parts of music that were musically intended to be quieter start to sound just as loud as every other part in the music.
This does not mean that the actual volume of the sound coming out of your speakers is any greater, again, you control that with the volume knob. In fact, I would bet that the end result is that the parts of songs that are musically intended to be the loudest tend not to be emitted at as high a volume as they would be otherwise.
The reason for that: if a piece of music has quiet parts (especially at the beginning, as is common in intros), you tend to turn it up. Now that you have increased the total volume, when the loud/energetic part of the song comes on, it will be louder than it would have been had you not turned it up (obviously). If there are not quiet parts, then you never need to turn it up, and you will tend to listen to the music at a consistent level, thus avoiding the peaks of maximum volume that would have occurred had the music had more dynamic range.
This is also why this issue is most annoying when you are listening to a range of different music from different eras (e.g. an eclectic playlist), or, when your music is interspersed with ads. You will turn up music that has greater dynamic range, but then a heavily compressed song or ad will come on, and now your volume setting is much too high to listen to it comfortably.
Lastly, in terms of why: the louder music is, the better it tends to sound (up to a certain point of course). To really get the full experience of a piece of music, you need to listen to it fairly loud. So in an era of songs with plenty of dynamic range, people could make songs stand out by making them much louder by comparison. Once the dynamic range of everything has been ruined, however, this effect goes away and the end result is what you have today.
With this you destroy the music. Maybe ok for your favorite Disco tune but but it turns Rock, Alternative and Classical music into crap That's why i cannot listen to classical music and some other music as mp3.
Volume is a pure measure of energy output, primarily controlled by a volume knob. Loudness is a psychoacoustic effect that measures our perception of loudness. Compressing the dynamic range of music makes it sound louder at all volumes, compared to music with a wider dynamic range.
So the loudness wars is an apt name. The deliberate compressions on music made the music sound louder, without people turning up the volume of the music, but in the process destroys any nuance in the music. Turning down the volume knob doesn’t reduce the effect in a meaningful way, sure it reduces the energy output of your speakers, but it won’t restore the nuance of the music, or eliminate clipped peaks where the music has exceeded the bit-depth of the digital carrier.
-------
A hearing researcher at House Ear Institute is concerned that the loudness of new albums could possibly harm listeners' hearing, particularly that of children.[48] The Journal of General Internal Medicine has published a paper suggesting increasing loudness may be a risk factor in hearing loss.[50][51]
-------
I assume that a "psychoacoustic effect" would not harm anyone's hearing, whereas volume - i.e. the measure of energy ouput - would, right? (And I know that agreeing with this statement doesn't invalidate your main point, I'm simply curious whether you agree with me that a reduction in dynamic range doesn't seem likely to harm anyone's hearing.)
In terms of your main point, I'm not sure I agree, but I really only have my own experience to draw upon, and am quite willing to concede the point. But to me, music with less dynamic range doesn't sound "louder", it sounds "more even", or something along those lines.
One of the things my wife does that drives me nuts when watching movies is she acts like a human compressor: she keeps the remote in her hand and turns down loud parts and turns up quiet parts. If I put the volume at a level that is appropriate, where quiet dialogue is audible but the loud parts (e.g. a car chase) are loud (as the filmmaker intended!) she will exclaim, "it's too loud!"
I offer this single anecdote as evidence that perhaps music with greater dynamic range can actually be perceived as louder, depending on the circumstances?
Not quite true. It’s a psychoacoustic effect because it’s something that can’t be observed outside of someone’s conscience, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a mechanical component to the effect.
Most importantly, the effect almost certainly has a substantial mechanical component that’s determined by how effectively your hearing system can couple sounds from your outer-ear into your inner-ear. Like all mechanical systems it’s transfer function is non-linear, it’s much better at coupling some frequencies that other frequencies.
If the compression done to the music is pushing the sound to in a frequency band that’s more strongly coupled, then energy output from the speaker might be the same, but the amount that ends up in your inner ear will increase, bringing with it higher chances of permanent damage.
- Showroom effect. You want to put your best foot forward when a consumer is only dipping in for a moment. Louder grabs attention harder.
- Crappy consumer stereo equipment. Low sensitivity, poor linearity, disposable earbuds and android phone speakers are the default. There's no room for nuance on those systems.
Here's an old but related site / campaign with lots of links too: https://www.turnmeup.org/
I had some serious deja vu reading that as I knew I had head it before. Took me minute to find it but it's said (almost) verbatim at 0:23 seconds into this song [0] that was on a playlist I sometimes listen to.
[0] https://open.spotify.com/track/17NCISfYJl0GITXs8G75Ae?si=4dd...