[silk] TOO LOUD, redux

[Udhay Shankar N]

More on the loudness and clipping controversy 
(which has cropped up (heh) on silk before - see 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/8821)

Do peruse the links at the end for much, much more on this.
Udhay

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/imperfect-sound-forever.htm

This article started life as a Soulseeking column 
about my new headphones, a rather 
delicious-sounding pair of Grado SR60s. The 
original opening line was meant to be as follows:


"You’d think I’d know Spirit Of Eden 
<http://www.stylusmagazine.com/feature.php?ID=40>pretty 
well by now. I’ve listened to it often enough. 
But maybe I haven’t listened to it well enough?"

And I was going to go on to detail how much, 
well, detail my wonderful new cans had rung out 
of this fantastic record, about how I'd noticed 
the sound of rain against the window of the 
building they recorded in during a few seconds of 
what I had previously considered to be 
near-silence at the start of "The Rainbow." I was 
going to witter on about the timbre of 
instruments, about how when I listened to Mark 
Hollis' eponymous solo album from 1998 I could 
hear the creak of the stool he was sitting on 
during recording. I was going to talk about how 
those little details, the accidents, the 
colourations of sound that remind you that people 
made this music, are almost as important as the 
music itself. But I got distracted. I got 
distracted because it suddenly dawned on me that 
an awful lot of recent music, much of which I adore, sounds horrible.

So, this new article starts like this:


Imperfect Sound Forever


The new Flaming Lips CD is the kind of 
cod-metaphysical psychedelia (there’s a reason 
actual philosophers don’t take acid­it stops them 
from thinking properly) that’s bound to garner 
glowing reviews from broadsheet critics to whom 
all music blends into a homogenous morass and to 
whom cosmic platitudes equal great spiritual 
insight. It’s pretty good; you could argue that 
they're running out of ideas and melodies and are 
compensating by being weird for the sake of it, 
and that Coyne's voice, never strong, is now so 
shot that you fear for his ability to even talk, 
but it's not a bad record. It is, however, an 
incredibly LOUD record. So it might as well be 
bad because I simply cannot stand to hear it.

I don’t mean that it’s lashed with savage, Angus 
Young-esque guitar riffs or grindcore percussion, 
because it’s not (it’s the kind of luscious, 
unpredictable-yet-lucid-dream futurist collage 
that Yoshimi… predicated, occasionally punctured 
with some rowdiness and energy); I simply mean 
that the CD itself when played back bashes out of 
your speakers at a massive, wearing volume. It’s 
not alone in its pummeling attack, either. In fact it’s far from alone.

Don’t get me wrong; music sounds better loud. 
It’s more dynamic, more exciting, you can hear 
more detail, you get a better sense of space as 
instruments and sounds surround you and involve 
you (like a Taoist says, the space between the 
spokes is the most important part of the wheel­as 
it is with music), and the physical pleasure of 
feeling a ripple of bass run through your body 
simply can’t be beaten. But loudness and dynamics 
aren’t the same thing. Loudness is relative. 
Surfer Rosa by The Pixies is an old CD that seems 
daintily quiet next to At War with the Mystics, 
but if you nudge the volume dial up and then up a 
little more and maybe up a little further, it 
gets better and better, louder and louder, the 
juxtapositional leap from whispered, undulating 
verse to hammer-attack chorus getting more and 
more exciting and visceral, guitars and bass and 
drums and Black Francis’ yowling curses all clear 
and vibrant and dangerously realistic. It could 
maybe do with a little more bass now that we're 
more able to reproduce low-frequencies than we 
were in 1988, but that's a very minor gripe. At 
War with the Mystics, on the other hand, just 
gets painful and messy and starts "clipping" when you turn it up.


I’m pretty anal about sound, and I’m prepared to 
admit it. I’m not a super-duper audiophile (I 
can’t afford to be), but I have spent hundreds 
thousands of pounds over the years on stereos, 
headphones, hi-fi separates, portable audio 
systems, and even (in my more gullible moments) 
biwired speaker cables and limestone slabs to 
position my speaker stands on, all in pursuit of 
the “perfect” sound: slightly more sparkle and 
physical *ping* in the treble (hearing the stick 
hit the hi-hat, perhaps, rather than a vague 
*splash*); a more rounded and tighter bass sound 
that doesn’t bloom like ugly bathwater and 
overwhelm the song; more realistic vocals that 
put the singer right in front of you, 
spittle-filled lips and all. You know the kind of 
thing… It’s like when serious wine buffs talk 
about being able to smell diesel or orange peel 
in a bottle of Shiraz: it seems like nonsense 
until you immerse yourself in the sensations of 
the discipline and find that you too are 
scrabbling for ridiculous metaphors to describe 
how something tastes or sounds or smells when you 
suddenly realise there are more nuances than you ever imagined.

It started when I was about sixteen and listened 
to “I Am the Resurrection” through shitty 
headphones out of a shitty boombox while trying 
to write an essay for school, straining to hear 
all these sounds buried in the song that I could 
faintly perceive but had never heard before when 
wheeling around my bedroom air-guitaring like a 
delirious fool. That moment planted a seed in me, 
made me want to hear everything possible, every 
detail in every song, soak it in and lose myself 
in it. For the last eleven years I’ve been trying 
to find that sound, and the equipment that will make it for me.

I’m not about to claim that you can’t “properly” 
enjoy music unless you’re running it through some 
multi-thousand-pound Naim system with enormous 
£900 Epos floorstanding speakers, because we all 
know that you can get a kick out of a great tune 
running off a crappy C90 cassette in a 
bog-standard car stereo. Or by playing the new 
Flaming Lips album through your iBook speakers, 
or through the earbuds that came with your MP3 
player. But that’s not the only way to listen to 
music, and certainly not the best way to listen 
properly, and I doubt anyone would disagree for 
long if you confronted them with even a modest 
hi-fi set-up that can really play.

I think music journalists have a responsibility 
to listen to records on at least half-decent 
equipment­film critics wouldn’t (I hope) review a 
film based on viewing it on an iPod Video during 
a train journey, and film studios would be aghast 
if they did. Certainly you could ascertain the 
plot from that, but film is about more than just 
story in the same way that music is about more 
than just song. Sadly very few music journalists 
appear to be concerned with the nuts and bolts of 
actual sound quality though­possibly because it 
“gets in the way of the music, maaaan,” but more 
likely because they’re scared that they’d look as 
if they didn’t know what they were talking about 
if they tried. I know more than a few people 
who’ve reviewed albums based solely on MP3s­I’ve 
done it myself in the past, to my shame. An art 
critic wouldn’t evaluate a painting based on a 
black & white Xerox, and while some people will 
be up in arms saying it’s not the same thing with 
music, I disagree­MP3s lose colour, space, and 
depth, all of which can affect your relationship with a song.

So what's the actual problem here? The reason At 
War with the Mystics is so punishingly loud is 
because of how it’s recorded, mixed and mastered, 
how the components and levels of the music are 
arranged and set in the processes before it gets put on to CD.

A quick lesson from someone who doesn’t fully 
understand (and I am very much a novice learning 
this stuff on-the-job as I research this 
article)­in basic, layman's terms “producing” 
gets the music out of the musicians; “recording” 
and “engineering” get it onto tape; “mixing” 
arranges the elements of the music on that tape; 
and “mastering” polishes the songs up to a 
cohesive shine and sets the final levels for the 
finished whole­it makes a bunch of "songs" into an "album," if you like.

Record companies these days (and I don’t just 
mean nasty behemoths like EMI or Sony­your 
favourite indie are probably just as bad) are 
eager to make CDs as loud as possible because 
they think, with some justification, that this is 
what people want. In order to get CDs to be 
consistently loud, they get 
compressed­essentially this means that the 
quieter moments are made louder in relation to 
the, um, louder moments, to make the entire CD a 
consistent, and high, level of volume. During the 
compression process, the tops of signals can be 
cut off, or "clipped." Compress a record too 
much, and it sounds bad. Make it “clip” even slightly, and it sounds worse.


There are two ways to measure "loudness"­peak 
levels and average levels. The former refers to 
the loudest part of a piece of music or sound; a 
crescendo or climax. The difference between the 
highest and lowest points makes for the average 
level. Sadly, the science of psychoacoustics 
suggests our ears generally respond to the 
average level rather than the peak level of 
volume­hence we would perceive a consistently 
loud piece of rock music as being "louder" than a 
piece of classical that reaches the same or even 
a higher volume level during a crescendo, simply 
because the rock song is "loud" all the way 
through. "Loud" records grab our attention 
(obviously­being louder they are harder to ignore 
on first impression) and in order to grab 
attention quicker and more effectively in a 
crowded marketplace, record companies and artists 
have been striving to make their records as loud 
as possible from the second the first note is played, whatever the cost.

This isn’t a recent thing. The "Loudness War" has 
been going on almost as long as pop music has 
existed, and probably longer­nobody has ever 
wanted their record to be the quietest on the 
jukebox or the radio. The Beatles lobbied 
Parlophone to get their records pressed on 
thicker vinyl so they could achieve a bigger bass 
sound more than 40 years ago. The MC5 apparently 
mixed their second album, Back in the USA, at 
such extreme volume in the studio that they 
failed to notice how tinny and thin it 
sounded­there's practically no bottom-end to it 
at all. Then there's Phil Spector's legendary 
"wall of sound" production style, mixed and 
mastered to sound good on tiny, tinny transistor 
radios, squeezing as big a sound as possible into 
as small a space. Three or four decades ago 
record companies would send out compilations of 
singles to radio stations on a single vinyl 
record­if a band or producer heard their song on 
one of these and it was quieter than the 
competitions’ song, they would call the mastering 
engineer and get him to up the levels until it 
was the loudest, even if that meant corrupting the sound quality.

The advent of CD technology in the early 80s 
changed the game, albeit not initially for the 
worse. CDs allowed for a greater dynamic range 
than vinyl or tape (live music spans 
approximately 120 dB; vinyl covers approx. 75 dB; 
CD ranges across approx. 90 dB)­meaning that they 
could be encoded with a much larger differential 
in volume between the quiet moments and the loud 
moments of a piece of music. The 90dB range of 
CDs encouraged mastering engineers to exploit the 
potential of the new format for a while, which 
made for a few awesome-sounding (but relatively 
quiet) albums mastered for the early days of CD, 
even though much of the industry hadn't yet 
cottoned-on to how to best exploit the new 
format. Of course the music itself wasn't always 
great however well-mastered, but for every Dire 
Straits there was a Blue Nile (almost). The early 
90s are considered by many to have been a golden 
age of mastering and sound engineering, when the 
industry had become familiar with CDs, technology 
had yet to be overtaken by commercial concerns, 
and albums were being mastered to exploit the medium rather than the market.


Levels have crept up over the last decade though, 
and alarmingly so. Nevermind is 6-8dB quieter 
than, say, Hopes & Fears by Keane­to 
contextualise this, those 6-8dB will make 
Nevermind sound approximately half as loud. On 
most modern CDs the music is squashed into the 
top 5 dB of a medium that has over 90 dB of 
range. It’s like the oft-quoted 
<http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/10percnt.htm>myth 
that humans use only 10% of their brain, only 
real­imagine what we could do if we realised 
potential. Think of the classic, exciting Pixies 
formula again­it doesn't exist anymore, because 
those dynamic leaps have been ironed out. Keane 
should NOT be twice as loud as Nirvana.

In fact you don’t need to imagine­just go back to 
Laughing Stock or Giant Steps or Selected Ambient 
Works 85-92 or Siamese Dream or Hex or Music for 
the Jilted Generation and listen for yourself. 
Play “Hey Ladies” from Paul's Boutique again, a 
song that's almost 20 years old, and feel just 
how head-snappingly phantasmagorical it is when 
the soundstage suddenly flips into widescreen 
during the intro. Is there anything remotely 
approaching that on the headachingly dense and 
loud St. Elsewhere by Gnarls Barkley? Not even 
slightly. Friends of mine (and fellow music 
writers) often cite Paul's Boutique as a record 
they'd like to hear remastered, but it sounds 
absolutely wonderful to my ears­it just needs 
turning up a touch on your own amplifier if you think it's not loud enough!

Music with an incredibly loud signal is referred 
to in the industry as "hot." One way to make 
music "hot" is by compressing it­essentially this 
means lowering the peaks so they're almost level 
with the troughs, and then increasing all of the 
signal to make it as loud as you can before it 
starts "clipping." Only a lot of people seemingly 
don't know when to stop. Compression can be added 
at almost any stage of the recording process, in 
large or small doses. Small increments added at 
both recording, mixing and mastering are more 
effective in preserving sound quality than huge 
leaps taken at the final stage, for instance.

One result of this is that modern CDs have much 
more consistent volume levels than ever before. 
But when is it desirable for music to be at a 
consistent volume? When it's not being actively 
listened to; i.e. when it's intended as 
background music. Sudden (or even gradual) 
dynamic changes in ambient volume disturb people 
from what they are otherwise doing (shopping, 
eating, working) by making them pay attention to 
the fluctuating sound rather than the task in 
hand­I only notice the air conditioning at work 
when it switches off ten minutes before I go home 
every day, for instance­for the previous eight 
hours, my brain tunes the hum out so I can 
concentrate. So it is with music too­it may grab 
your attention more effectively at the start, but 
it's ultimately easier to ignore too. All music 
becomes background music if it's at one flat 
level, no matter how loud. And flat, hypnotic 
background music is a form of social control­I 
used to work in the catering industry and there 
was significant research suggesting that diners 
played ambient music with a low BPM and steady 
level ate slower and made less mess when eating. 
Similarly a faster BPM made them eat quicker­the 
type of establishment you piped music to 
determined the music used; fast food restaurants 
wanting multiple table covers play pop, rock, and 
R&B, while classier, more sedate places play jazz or classical.


Not only are the volume differentials flattened 
when you compress music, but bass and treble 
frequencies are pressed into the midrange and the 
space surrounding instruments is lost, making 
them less easy to separate when you listen. Bass 
frequencies drive music, they give us a physical 
sensation to hold onto and ride through a song. 
Play "Unfinished Sympathy" on a decent hi-fi and 
the sub-bass shots that open the song hit you 
like a punch in the belly and a pillow-whack to 
the chest. Play Girls Aloud's superficially 
sonically savage "Wake Me Up," Nine Inch Nails 
meets Gwen Stefani, on the same set-up, and it 
sounds flat and lifeless. Treble frequencies by 
contrast add imaging­a sparkling, accurate treble 
hit can almost be seen­think Jacko's early 80s 
work with Quincy, all those pointillist pricks of 
light over the top; cymbals, shakers, and 
twinkling keys. Try The Killers though and their 
cymbal work is so muddy and indistinct that it's 
hard to even identify, let alone hear clearly. 
Speakers work by moving air molecules. Overly 
compressed music moves a LOT of molecules, but it 
doesn’t move them very precisely.

Artists want to make their CDs excessively "hot" 
for the sake of being louder on the radio, but 
this is fallacious. The sad thing is that radio 
equalises music anyway, songs are run through a 
whole other set of compressors during the 
broadcast process to even-out differences in 
volume, which means CDs don’t actually need to be 
mastered loudly to sound loud on radio­in the UK 
even relatively open-sounding channels like Radio 
3 and Radio 4 are compressed in order to send the 
signal as efficiently as possible. They’re also 
very quiet compared to the uber-compressed Radio 
1, which is designed for a punchy, consistent 
sound, the poor quality of which isn’t fully 
apparent when listening on a dodgy mono set in a 
workshop or in the car, which is what demographic 
research suggests are the most common listening 
environments for Radio 1. Television is much the 
same­watching VH1’s A-Z of Anthems the other 
night I was stunned to hear how much the level of 
vocals and synths in Underworld’s “Born Slippy” 
dropped when the beat came in, presumably because 
neither the television nor the station could 
handle the dynamic shift. As for DAB… well, the 
payoff for having a million radio stations is 
that most of them transmit at 128kbps or less. I 
wouldn't listen to an MP3 encoded that badly, so 
I'm certainly not going to listen to radio at that bitrate.

If there’s a jump-the-shark moment as far as CD 
mastering goes then it’s probably Oasis. In 1987 
Appetite for Destruction averaged about -15dB 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_mean_square>RMS 
volume, and was considered loud. By 1994 the 
average loudness in RMS power for a rock record 
was -12dB. (What’s the Story) Morning Glory in 
1995 hit a phenomenal -8dB on many tracks. The 
1997 remaster of Raw Power reaches an 
extraordinary -4dB, making it supposedly the 
loudest rock record ever. In 2005 the average RMS 
volume is -9dB. Audiophiles and people who work 
in audio engineering largely agree that this is 
too loud, but in the face of massive commercial 
impetus their say is often ignored. Arguably 
(What’s the Story) Morning Glory became so 
successful in the UK precisely because it was so 
loud; its excessive volume and lack of dynamics 
meant it worked incredibly well in noisy 
environments like cars and crowded pubs, meaning 
it very easily became an ubiquitous and noticeable record in cultural terms.

Music isn’t meant to be at a consistent volume 
and flat frequency; it’s meant to be dynamic, to 
move, to fall and rise and to take you with it, 
physically and emotionally. Otherwise it 
literally is just background noise. Compressed 
CDs grab your attention in the same way that 
people who shout grab your attention, and they’re 
just as tiring and annoying in the long run if 
you’re standing too close to them. They sound 
fine if you’re playing them back through some 
satellites and a subwoofer hooked up to your PC, 
or through a half-decent pair of headphones and 
an iPod, or in your car where the compression 
helps the music rise above engine and road noise; 
but if you push them through a system designed to 
reproduce sound as realistically and effectively 
as possible, they can and do sound pretty 
poor­forced, lifeless, wearing, and flat. Much 
more information about dynamic range compression, 
to use its full name, from people who know what 
they’re talking about considerably more than I 
do, can be found in the links at the bottom of 
this article. As you can see if you read on from 
there, some mastering engineers claim that a huge 
amount of professionally released CDs since the 
turn of the decade (and earlier) have been so 
compressed that they don’t even consider them to 
be “musical.” I can’t bear to play back some of 
my favourite records from the last few years 
through my hi-fi and pay them full attention, and this is upsetting.


Dynamic range compression may be responsible for 
a multitude of recent record industry sins but 
it’s a difficult phenomenon to identify if you're 
not aware of what you're looking for. Aside from 
making records simply sound louder and flattening 
the delivered frequencies, it also sucks all the 
space out of music, but many people simply aren’t 
accustomed to listening to what isn’t there.

In the days before digital coaxial and optical 
recording to minidisc or CDR, home taping 
enthusiasts would have to set the analogue 
recording levels so that the peak level, i.e. the 
loudest moment of the song, was to just below the 
red on a cassette recorder’s level indicator. 
Pushing it into the red clips and distorts the 
signal, and blows your speakers if you hammer 
them too hard. But the key thing is that the 
levels would vary­low for quiet moments, high for 
louder. It’s stultifyingly obvious. Modern CDs 
hit the peak level from the off though, and stay 
there resolutely. When the music gets louder 
there is literally nowhere else for it to go on 
the CD because the CD is already "full" (i.e. the 
music is already at the top of the CD's dynamic 
range and thus as loud as it can be) , and it 
maxes out, resulting in clipping of the signal.

It used to be said that valve gear when pushed to 
distort makes the right type of harmonic 
distortion to make music sound better (valve 
compressors and desks backing up that claim) and 
that solid state (i.e. digital) makes a very 
different type of (un)harmonic distortion. 
Digital distortion is unacceptable, because 
unlike analogue where the sound goes through a 
subtle “furring” as you start to overload signal 
levels, an overloaded digital signal remains the 
same until it suddenly goes QUACK through the 
speakers (similar to a scratched CD skipping). 
This can and does damage equipment if it’s driving music at high levels.

On At War with the Mystics, for instance, there 
is so much clipping during the crescendos (which 
aren't real crescendos anyway, because they're 
the same volume) that it almost seems as if it's 
being used deliberately as another instrument in 
the mix. It’s this flatness, this clipping, this 
unwavering attack, that wears and tires and means 
you won’t listen to your favourite records, if 
they’re from the last few years, as often as you 
might want to, because they are intrinsically 
unmusical and unpleasant. Hence, perhaps, the 
perpetual merry-go-round of seeking the newest 
flavour-of-the-month; over-compressed music 
sounds great for a couple of listens, but there 
is little desire to replay the music because your 
brain recognises that there is something 
fundamentally unmusical about the sound.

Music is about tension and release. With very 
"hot," un-dynamic music there is no release 
because the sensory assault simply doesn’t 
let-up. By the time you've listened closely (or 
tried to) to a whole album that's heavily 
compressed, you end up feeling like Alex at the 
end of A Clockwork Orange­battered, fatigued by, 
and disgusted with the music you love. I think 
the reason I suffer from a musical malaise for 
the first couple of months of every year recently 
is largely because October, November and December 
are spent frantically listening to a morass of 
the year's records in an effort to concoct 
"best-of" lists for end-of-year polls. By 
Christmas I simply have a massive dose of 
listening fatigue that takes 8-10 weeks to 
recover from. I very much doubt that this is just me.


Who’s guilty then, beyond Wayne Coyne’s merry 
psychedelic troubadours? The simple answer is 
almost everyone, but some offenders are much, 
much worse than others. Californication by Red 
Hot Chilli Peppers is so loud and suffers from so 
much digital clipping that even non-audiophile 
consumers complained about it. Hot Fuss by The 
Killers is one of the most unpleasantly flat and 
harsh recordings I have ever heard, so much so 
that I couldn't bring myself to play it again and 
recently sold it. Sounds great on the radio 
though… The new Embrace album, as much as I love 
the songs and arrangements, is like a shock and 
awe assault designed to prepare for a later land 
attack. Part of the reason Mogwai’s new album 
fails to truly engage me is that the quiet bits 
are pretty much as loud as the loud bits­if you 
too consider that the real thrill of the Scottish 
postrockers was their dizzying command of 
dynamics as demonstrated on “Like Herod,” then 
it’s no wonder that Mr Beast has arrived to such 
a muted reception. The Liars' Drum's Not Dead is 
meant to be some kind of percussion odyssey, but 
it has one of the worst, most over-compressed, 
hollow, and unrealistic drum sounds I've ever 
heard. Try listening to Songs for the Deaf by 
Queens of the Stone Age while thinking about 
compression and it becomes almost unbearable. But 
perhaps that's the point? It’s sequenced with 
skits to make it sound like listening to a car 
radio, after all­a concept album about sounding 
horrible. Noise artists like Merzbow routinely 
master CDs so "hot" as to render them almost 
unlistenable, simply because they want their music to be like that.

Even The White Stripes, those fashionistas of 
vintage recording and mixing technology, compress 
their records massively; it’s just not as obvious 
(or wearing) because there are usually less 
elements being crammed into the mix in the first 
place. It's similar with a lot of R&B and 
hip-hop­minimal music without many compositional 
elements (a bassline, a drum track, a single 
synth and a vocal, perhaps) can be compressed to 
seem much louder than a more densely layered 
piece of music with more elements, because each 
ingredient can be made to take up that much more 
space on the CD itself in terms of raw 
information/signal. To try and apply that EQ and 
compression to a densely layered or orchestrated 
piece of music is futile. But people will try it anyway.

Compression loses space and realism and 
involvement. Why go back to a piece of music 
that's hard, unnatural and unpleasant? This is 
not saying "only listen to acoustic guitars" 
because this affects ALL music­minimal hip-hop 
and heavily textured electronic music both sound 
better if you can hear them properly, if they 
have dynamics that you can ride as you listen, 
that take you somewhere emotionally rather than 
just battering you in order to get your attention.

How many times have you been blown away by a 
band’s demo only to find the professionally 
recorded version of it, mixed and mastered 
properly, sounds lifeless and dull? One repeated 
complaint against Arctic Monkeys' debut album is 
that it lacks the excitement of the early demos 
that caused such a fuss online. Why? Because the 
final recording and release is compressed to 
hell, loses its space, its dynamic, its vitality, and its excitement.

Compression in itself isn't bad though; many 
state of the art rock records and iconic sounds 
from the last 40 years would not exist without 
the good old compressor. “Tomorrow Never Knows,” 
John Bonham's drum sound, “Song 2,” Lennon's 
piano sound on Plastic Ono, Ride, Public Enemy 
and countless others, basically anyone with a 
savage electric guitar or really driving 
drumbeat, would not sound the way they do, 
punchy, exciting, intriguing, otherworldly, and 
brilliant, if it weren’t for compression. The 
recent and escalating problems with compression 
are "user errors"; people falling victim to 
negative instincts and misguided commercial 
desires, a kind of penis envy transposed to 
volume, and sabotaging their own records in the 
process. The key, as always, is to use the 
available tools with taste in sympathy/empathy 
with the actual music you’re creating, not just 
to max them out because you can.


We know why artists, producers and labels want 
loud CDs, but why do consumers want them if they 
sound so bad when played through good hi-fi 
equipment? As with anything, technology and the 
pace of modern life are probably to blame. 
Possibly we're just too lazy to reach for the 
volume knob. If people listen to music in 
substandard conditions where they can’t even hear 
it properly, why bother to make the music that 
they’re listening to worth listening to well in the first place?

Think about how you listen for a moment. I’d 
wager that a large chunk of your listening is 
done during a commute, whether that’s in a car or 
on a bus or train or a walk through a city 
centre. I listen a lot on the train myself, 
running my iPod (songs encoded as 192kb AAC 
files) through a pair of Koss Portapros and 
trying to sit next to other people who have 
earphones in so my leaking sound doesn’t offend 
commuters who want to read or whatever. 
Unsurprisingly I see a lot of other people with 
MP3 players, most of them using tiny earbuds of 
various kinds. Often their ears are plugged and 
their eyes are intently focused on a book or 
magazine or even a mobile phone screen too, 
senses shut to the horror of public transport. I 
get the impression that they’re not listening to 
music so much as avoiding what’s outside.

I fidget when I listen to music in public. I tap 
my feet, nod my head, drum my fingers together. 
Occasionally, if I’m pretty sure no one’s 
looking, I’ll break out into a spectacular 
air-drum roll, swooshing my invisible sticks 
across fifty tom-toms, thirty cymbals and 
heaven-only-knows how many snares and kick-drums. 
While full-on drum rolls might be rare, the rest 
is commonplace whether I’m on the train or 
walking through the woods. Other people I see out 
and about wearing walkmans or MP3 players seldom 
seem to tap, or nod, or hum along at all though; 
instead their gazes seem fixed with a steely 
resolve, their bodies tense and their minds 
seemingly tenser. To me that isn’t the body language of someone enjoying music.

The story goes that Brian Eno “invented” ambient 
music after a car accident, when he was forced to 
stay in hospital dosed on painkillers, and 
someone left a radio playing so quietly that he 
couldn’t properly hear the music it emitted no 
matter how much he strained. The genre that this 
happenstance spawned has produced some truly 
wonderful music over the years, music that both 
floats absently in a room and that can be paid 
great attention to; like a painting hung on a 
wall that you see everyday but seldom look at. It 
strikes me that the way many people are listening 
to music these days­on trains, in offices, on the 
street­is not a normal listening experience. It 
is neither conscious engagement nor ambient 
enhancement. It’s a hermetic seal, a blockade to 
the outside world. It’s the opposite of ambient 
music, in that it doesn’t become a part of or 
complement the environment it is played in, but 
rather destroys it. How often do people simply 
sit down and listen to a record, rather than 
putting on some music while they do something else?

The rise of the iPod (or other generic MP3 player 
of your choice) initially made me hopeful that 
people would start putting a greater level of 
thought into mixing new music with headphones in 
mind, and it looks as if my hope has been borne 
out­sadly I was thinking more of increased 
ambient detail and stereo-imaging than outright 
sonic attack. Mixing for headphones is a very 
different thing from mixing for iPods­binaural 
recording already exists, for instance, and is a 
very different approach to the idea of making 
music to be listened to via headphones. I've read 
countless articles about people shunning their 
iPods because they encouraged them to 
over-saturated themselves with music (and even 
written one myself, 
<http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/soulseeking.htm>almost), 
but there are countless more by people who think 
that all music, all the time is a great thing, 
even if they never actually listen.


Compression is a way of life. A week's worth of 
radio broadcasts have become an hour-long 
podcast. Think of those plastic bags you can get 
for clothes with a hole to stick a vacuum cleaner 
nozzle in so you can suck all the air out and 
pack them tighter. We squash fruit into 
smoothies, social policy into soundbites, 
vitamins into pills, entire meals into cans and 
English into txt spk, all so we can consume 
things quicker than ever before. But quicker is 
not the same as better. Meanings, subtleties, and 
understandings are lost because we don't have the time to pick up on them.

People are forgetting how to listen, and who can 
blame them? Music is ubiquitous­it pervades every 
shop, every café, every workplace, every 
restaurant, every television programme, and every 
film. It is pervasive to such an extent that some 
of us, who would profess to love music, find 
ourselves trying to actively avoid it during the 
day so that we can more fully enjoy it when we 
choose to, when we know we can appreciate it. 
Increased availability and increased choice do 
not equal increased quality­we're taught that we 
can have everything we want, but not taught how to decide what we want.

But people are slowly realising that so many 
modern CDs sound so bad because they're too 
loud­they may not consciously know the reasons, 
but subconsciously listeners are shunning overly 
"hot" music; a swift analysis of album chart 
sales suggests more people are buying modern 
easy-listening and AOR types than rock, pop, 
hip-hop, or dance albums, presumably because 
people are simply tired of being shouted at. The 
increase in home cinema and the wonderful 
dynamics it can bring is making people aware that 
today’s music, by comparison, is flat and dull, 
even if it’s “louder.” The recent Kate Bush album 
was a strike against unnecessary volume, and 
Leaders of the Free World by Elbow contains some 
startling dynamic shifts. Nashville is beginning 
to understand how its music is harmed by the 
pursuit of loudness, and country records are being clawed back from the brink.

Please, just stop a moment and think about how 
you’re listening, about what you’re listening to 
and how it sounds. If you want to listen to 
something loud, there’s a simple method­turn it up.

Links
-<http://www.recordtech.com/prodsounds.htm>Producing 
Great Sounding Phonograph Records (or Why Records 
Don’t Always Sound Like the Master Tape)
-<http://www.soundmirror.com/articles.html>Sound Mirror: Mastering Articles
-<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war>Wikipedia: The Loudness War
-<http://www.tcelectronic.com/Default.asp?Id=4391>Mastering6000
-<http://www.performermag.com/loudness.php>The Loudness War
-<http://www.digido.com/portal/pmodule_id=11/pmdmode=fullscreen/pageadder_page_id=59>How 
to Make Better Records in the 21st Century
-<http://www.communicationsact.gov.uk/responses/DAB%20University%20of%20Essex.doc>Regulation 
in Digital Broadcasting
-<http://www.cdmasteringservices.com/dynamicrange.htm>What 
happened to Dynamic Range?

Thanks to MD and ME for opinions, photos, and 
facts, and ER for putting up with me not shutting 
up about this for the last two months.





--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))