Nice find. Although I can’t see the situation improving any time soon – people’s idea of ‘quality sound’ has deteriorated so much over the past 20 years with the advent of MP3, cheap portable music players and the fact that most people listen to music on their computers nowadays (usually on the built-in speakers or cheap powered speakers that came with the PC). I engineered a small pub gig at the weekend, and after the band had finished the girl who organised the event handed me a bunch of CDs that her little sister had prepared to be played until the venue closed. Every track on it sounded like it had been downloaded from Youtube, with the glaring compression artefacts typical of low bitrate MP3s. After a while I became conscious of the fact that I was sat with my fists clenched and muscles tensed up – that sound puts me on edge, I hate it! No-one else seemed to notice or care though, it’s depressing really.

I think it’s a little unfair to place the blame on Green Day or Alicia Keys though. The ‘loudness war’ is driven by the cloth-eared suits who run the labels and have the final say over how the final master should sound, and supported by an apathetic public. I watched another video a while back where a mastering engineer described the exact process he had to go through to squeeze every last bit of headroom for a demanding record label boss (he kept getting his mixes sent back as they weren’t loud enough). From memory it involved stereo compression of the mix, then multiband compression, clipping in the analogue domain and clipping in the digital domain!! I think at one point it may have also been printed to tape above saturation point to introduce even more distortion! It all results in a boring sound.

Until consumers start to be a bit more discerning about how they listen to their music, buying a half decent hifi (they’re not expensive) and getting their tunes on high quality MP3 at the very least (and preferably wav – digital storage is cheap nowadays, and download speeds are fast – IMO there’s not much excuse for MP3 anymore), we’re going to continue seeing badly mastered music in the future.

So I’ve just finished prepping a whole stack of walk-up music for an award show I’m mixing in a few days and was reminded of this thread, as it’s really hit home just how much louder today’s music is, compared to that made only 10 or so years ago.

For those not interested in watching award shows (I would generally include myself in that group), it is usual for each winner, presenter, sponsor etc to walk up to the stage accompanied by music (often pre-recorded pop music, whatever is in the top 10 at the time). The sound engineer replays this on cue from whoever is calling the show. It’s important that all tracks play at the same perceived level of loudness for the audience, so I trim the gain for each track to bring them roughly in line with each other. Amongst the cheesy, over-compressed pop, I’ve managed to sneak in a couple of bangers (e.g. Walk This Land by EZ-Rollers), and I’ve had to bring most of the modern pop music down fully 8 or 9dB to make it sound as loud. Bear in mind that an increase of 10dB is generally equated to a perceived doubling of loudness, and you can see how much louder things have actually become!