The Loudness Wars

Anybody who has been working in audio for more than 20 years is acutely aware of the loudness wars in all of our lives. From music production, to broadcast to film, dynamic range has been reduced while overall real and perceived levels have increased.

Some argue that this is not such a bad thing. It's a tool to get your music heard by more people. I have just the opposite viewpoint. The public may not be cognitively aware of the loudness wars, but the consequences are obvious. Whole industries have been spawned from the public's inate hatred of the loudness wars. TIVO is a prime example. When a commercial comes on 6 to 10dBFS louder than the show you choose to watch, what do you do? You jump for the remote to either mute the audio or fast forward through the commercial. Marketers, producers and corporate executives have insisted on turning their pitches up to agonizing levels. Almost all mixers have heard the mantra to "Make sure our commercial as loud as the other ones"...just so that the intended audience can turn them off.

In the music world, which should be immune to the loudness wars, it's even worse. Not even country and acoustic music have been spared the reduction of dynamic range. Many a country song starts with solo acoustic guitar and ends with a full band including drums electric instruments played through Marshall amps all the while staying within a 2dBFS dynamic range.

We've managed to almost completely eliminate one of the greatest tools in the audio/music toolbox...dynamics. How did this happen? Simply put; we got lazy.

In the old days (like 30 years ago), we used to do two versions of a mix. If not that, at least two versions got mastered. One was for the album, which kept the original dynamics of the song/arrangement, and one was for the radio. We allowed and even encouraged the mastering engineer to put the squeeze on a mix in order for the radio station to get their full signal as far as possible within their legal broadcast range. It was simply a compromise we were willing to make in order to expose the greatest amount of radio listeners to our music. The good mastering engineers could do this very well.

Then came the CD. Most of us were excited that at long last, the physical dynamic limitations of the vinyl disc were a thing of the past. Listeners could now hear music as it was intended to be heard. That idea went away quickly as the marketing departments discovered that not only has dynamic range been extended overall, but that you could simply turn everything up and overpower the competition. The beginning of loudness wars had almost nothing to do with audio quality. It was a sales gimmick, pure and simple. Then as budgets went down, the "singles' mix" became a thing of the past and everything was mastered with loudness in mind.

The good mastering engineers did not like it, but for a while, they managed to keep it under control. Then came the home studios, even smaller budgets and the "why do we need mastering engineers?" phenomenon. The squeeze turned into the squash and rather than using compression as an effect to achieve a unique sound, it became a mandatory component of mixing, mastering and marketing music.

Today, heavy compression is used almost as a starting point and not as a tool to enhance a musical composition. That leads to the question; have dynamics in music become a quaint tool of the past? If so, it's a sad era in the creative world. We are losing one of the key elements of emotion and feel that make music unique. Music becomes Muzak. It loses its spark, its element of surprise, its ability to draw them into another world vs bludgeoning them with it . It becomes something used only to sell cereals, cars, clothing lines and Viagra.

Does it have to be this way? No...absolutely not. Especially since the main stream music business is now, more than ever, in the control of the musicians, producers and engineers. We can market our own music, not over the radio, but over the internet. We can control what we put out and re-educate our listeners. We can give them something many of them have never heard. A big dynamic range. Beethoven knew it, the great film composers knew it, the best jazz, rock, blues, R&B and country musicians knew it. Dynamics is one of the greatest tools in a musician's or a mixer's arsenal of tools. Let's use it...not lose it.

To find out more about the dynamics war, check out these resources.

1. Turn Me Up!
2. Overproduction
3. Why Music Sounds Worse
4. Anti-Loudness Day
5. The Future Of Music
6. An audio/visual example of light and heavy compression