Loudness wars may be over?

[JimmyM]

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertai...s-wars-is-musics-noisy-arms-race-over/242293/

Thought this would be a good topic for you since you do so many different styles in your production work. What's your perspective on it? For your masters, is it bad to set your peaks to be as close to the line as possible if you leave some dynamics in it, or is it overly compressing and pushing it all up to the line that's the problem?

 

[JimmyM]

Well I thought it was a good question

 

[nutdog]

Maybe he couldn't hear you?

 

[dmrogers]

Dynamics is a big part of what is missing in todays music.

I was checking out some of the ACM Awards Sunday (quite by accident, since I never watch these type of shows). The music was hard to listen to. It was all pushed to the celling. No dynamics at all. It was off the chain.

A good friend of mind put in into perspective pretty well: "If I am looking on stage and see several musicians playing and I can't distinguish what you are playing because the music is one loud jumbled work of mess, what is the use?".

Interesting topic (question) Jimmy.

 

[Dixon Steele]

I'm doing my master thesis on a subject that involves loudness in music, so I've read quite a bit about the loudness wars recently. I havent' checked out the article you linked yet, but I'm definetly gonna check it out, it looks really interesting.

For anyone interested in the background of the loudness war I can only recommend reading this article. It really covers everything, and does so, in what I think is, a very objective way. In any case, I think it's an incredibly interesting subject, and I feel every musician recording a new album should be aware of how exagerrated compression changes the music.

 

[JimmyM]

Very cool PDF there. So I gather it's about compression most of all. Real interesting waveform on that Metallica sample Reminds me of what they do for commercials to bump up levels without exceeding the maximum volume of the program.

 

[pbass2]

I feel like people HAVE been backing off in the last few years from the totally slammed brickwall sound. I do some mastering and more often than not I get asked to make things "warm" now as opposed to "loud" That article is a couple years old I notice, and I do think the trend is waning since then. Funny though, in the case of Sleigh Bells, I think it's part of their vibe and it works for them!