From yesterday's Wall Street Journal, a very interesting article about modern CD mastering. There's definitely some relevance for the surf music community here - I've noticed that European surf CDs tend to be quite a bit louder than US (or other places) surf CDs. I've often wondered why that is. Any idea?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122228767729272339.html?mod=todays_us_page_one

SEPTEMBER 25, 2008

Even Heavy-Metal Fans Complain That Today's Music Is Too Loud!!!

They Can't Hear the Details, Say Devotees of Metallica; Laying Blame on iPods

By ETHAN SMITH

Can a Metallica album be too loud?

The very thought might seem heretical to fans of the legendary metal band, which has been splitting eardrums with unrivaled power since the early 1980s.

But even though Metallica's ninth studio release, "Death Magnetic," is No. 1 on the album chart, with 827,000 copies sold in two weeks, some fans are bitterly disappointed: not by the songs or the performance, but the volume. It's so loud, they say, you can't hear the details of the music.

"Death Magnetic" is a flashpoint in a long-running music-industry fight. Over the years, rock and pop artists have increasingly sought to make their recordings sound louder to stand out on the radio, jukeboxes and, especially, iPods.

But audiophiles, recording professionals and some ordinary fans say the extra sonic wallop comes at a steep price. To make recorded music seem louder, engineers must reduce the "dynamic range," minimizing the difference between the soft and loud parts and creating a tidal wave of aural blandness.

"When there's no quiet, there can be no loud," said Matt Mayfield, a Minnesota electronic-music teacher, in a YouTube video that sketched out the battle lines of the loudness war. A recording's dynamic range can be measured by calculating the variation between its average sound level and its maximum, and can be visually expressed through wave forms. Louder recordings, with higher average sound levels, leave less room for such variation than quieter ones.

Some fans are complaining that "Death Magnetic" has a thin, brittle sound that's the result of the band's attempts in the studio to make it as loud as possible. "Sonically it is barely listenable," reads one fan's online critique. Thousands have signed an online petition urging the band to re-mix the album and release it again.

Metallica and the album's producer, Rick Rubin, declined to comment. Cliff Burnstein, Metallica's co-manager, says the complainers are a tiny minority. He says 98% of listeners are "overwhelmingly positive," adding: "There's something exciting about the sound of this record that people are responding to."

Key Witness
But the critics have inadvertently recruited a key witness: Ted Jensen, the album's "mastering engineer," the person responsible for the sonic tweaks that translate music made in a studio into a product for mass duplication and playback by consumers. Responding to a Metallica fan's email about loudness, Mr. Jensen sent a sympathetic reply that concluded: "Believe me, I'm not proud to be associated with this one." The fan posted the message on a Metallica bulletin board and it quickly drew attention.

Mr. Jensen regrets his choice of words but not the sentiment. "I'm not sure I would have said quite the same thing if I was posting it to the bulletin board," he says. But "it's certainly the way I feel about it."

The battle has roots in the era before compact discs. With vinyl records, "it was impossible to make loud past a certain point," says Bob Ludwig, a veteran mastering engineer. But digital technology made it possible to squeeze all of the sound into a narrow, high-volume range. In addition, music now is often optimized for play on the relatively low-fidelity earbuds for iPods, reducing incentives to offer a broad dynamic range.

The loudness war began heating up around the time CDs gained popularity, in the early 1980s. Guns N' Roses' "Appetite for Destruction" upped the ante in 1987, as did Metallica's 1991 "Black Album" and then the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Californication" in 1999.

Less to Hear
Music released today typically has a dynamic range only a fourth to an eighth as wide as that of the 1990s. That means if you play a newly released CD right after one that's 15 years old, leaving the volume knob untouched, the new one is likely to sound four to eight times as loud. Many who've followed the controversy say "Death Magnetic" has one of the narrowest dynamic ranges ever on an album.

Sound engineers say artists who insist on loudness paradoxically give people less to hear, because they end up wiping away nuances and details. Everything from a gently strummed guitar to a pounding snare drum is equally loud, leading to what some call "ear fatigue." If the listener turns down the volume knob, the music loses even more of its punch.

But many musicians, producers and record-company executives "think that having a louder record is going to translate into greater sales," says Chris Athens, Mr. Jensen's business partner and a fellow engineer. "Nobody really wants to have a record that's not as loud as everybody else's" in an iTunes playlist, he adds.

Mastering engineers are caught in the crossfire. "I've had lots of people -- I mean lots and lots of people -- try and push a record to a place I thought it didn't belong," Mr. Athens says. "We try to deliver something that mitigates the damage the client wants. I drag my feet and give them something a little louder and a little louder."

Albums by some of the biggest names in rock, including the most recent by U2, Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney, have drawn flak. Bloggers last year singled out Mr. Ludwig, the veteran engineer, for the sound on Mr. Springsteen's "Magic," which some thought was tinny and loud.

Mr. Ludwig wouldn't discuss the instructions he was given, but said, "Bruce doesn't let anything out unless it's exactly the way he wants it to be." Mr. Springsteen and his manager, Jon Landau, declined through a spokeswoman to comment.

As for the deafening "Death Magnetic," it struck one fan as fitting for these tumultuous times, thanks to songs like "Broken, Beat and Scarred" and "All Nightmare Long," says Metallica's co-manager, Mr. Burnstein. He says an investment banker emailed to say that "the album and its song titles have just become the soundtrack of Wall Street for fall 2008."

Write to Ethan Smith at ethan.smith@wsj.com

Ivan
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It was made very clear to me in making the last podcast. It features mostly 1st wave songs but I threw in some new Surf Coasters songs. The audio program I use displays the sound in wave form. All the old songs only fill about 60% of the amplitude and has about a 50/50 ration of lows and highs sort of like a hair comb. The Surf Coasters fills about 90% and is completely dense except for the top 25% which has some seperation, more like a mustache comb

FWIW, The new Neptunes song also on the podcast is closer to the old songs in terms of wave shape.

Speaking of the podcast, should be up today or tomorrow.

Danny Snyder

"With great reverb comes great responsibility" - Uncle Leo

Playing keys and guitar with Combo Tezeta

Formerly a guitarist in The TomorrowMen and Meshugga Beach Party

Latest surf project - Now That's What I Call SURF

Volume wars has been going since the first band hit the stage...one of the more humorous articles I read about live stage wars:

http://dannysmixingdesk.blogspot.com/search/label/Live%20Sound%20Reinforcement

In the recording field, compress the crap out of anything and you get less dynamic range and more volume. So a lot of people overuse levelers, compressors, and EQ's when recording, mixing and finally mastering. Nowadays almost anyone with a home studio can crank out a superior product to what was capable in the 60's with a 4 track machine. But that 4 track machine and mastering to vinyl was a different art.

I have had seminars with Craig Anderton and Eddie Kramer. Both well respected people. With completely different views on recording too. Craig would love to kill the volume wars on recordings and sums up MP3 quality as "what smells worse, 10 day old garbage or 11 day old garbage?" But at times, a necessary evil.

Eddie, on the other hand (take a look at the bands he has engineered for) says, "It's great big hairy a$$ rock and roll, it's not a symphony".

http://www.craiganderton.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Kramer

But regardless of their different viewpoints, both of them will agree on one point. If it sounds good to you, it's the right thing but don't be surprised if your fans disagree...:-)

Mel

Aren't we really talking about the over-use of compression? that is what makes it hard to hear all the parts, it's all mashed up to the same level.

I just read an article in an audio magazine about the resurgence of LPs, and folks that stage listening parties with records and turntables. The main comment was the dynamic range and the ability to hear more detail, reverb sounds better, the over-all reality of the sound vs digital. A big part of that article was about the over use of compression. I am going to go home and hook up the old turntable and find my best records... My interest is officially piqued.

THe NEpTuNeS

dp
Ivan, thanks for this article...a good read.

This whole issue of loud, overly-compressed, overly-limited, overly-EQ-ed, overly processed, master recordings and terrible sounding mp3s (and other digital formats), as well a lousy playback devices (like cell phones and earbuds) points directly at the assumption that "more is always better". In my experience, "more" is usually worse.

I don't own an ipod, and I don't shop at itunes...i really don't care for the sound of MP3 and portable audio devices.

And it should be possible to master differently for MP3, vinyl and CD today. They have been doing special radio mixes for ages.

The overcompressed sound is good competition in short bursts like a one round boxing fight, but they don’t make a great field of long distance runners. At record companies there’s more music to listen to, than you could in 3 lifetimes. Yet the only people who often or constantly listen to music are the classics and jazz people. The rock and pop crowd puts something on when it comes from the mastering plant, turn it up really loud, probably touch themselves and after 30 minutes the surrounding offices can relax again for a week or two.

The Exotic Guitar of Kahuna Kawentzmann

You can get the boy out of the Keynes era, but you can’t get the Keynes era out of the boy.

estreet - very good points. Sure there were heavily compressed recordings in the sixties (Joe Meek comes to mind as well), but it was still not as drastic as today. I think the threshold was measured at another point and thus limiting the range of the units (no pun intended). I don’t remember the technical terms right now, but my Waves Renaiscance Comp plug-in behaves that way and compared to modern compression plugs it is very subtile.

To me multiband compression was a big turning point. A device that’s mostly used to increase loudness. It does so by splitting up the music into frequency bands and compressing those individually. So the stereo sum is broken into mids, treble and bass. The bands contain bits and pieces of the most different kinds of instruments and apply the same attack and releases to them regardless. While other parts of all these different instruments in other frequency bands are being applied another attack, ratio and release set. You can destroy the grooviest of drum performances this way. Sort of glueing it together by putting a sum limiter after the multiband - I’m not sure it’s a real improvement.

It's common knowledge that bad musicians try to cover up their sloppy performances by drenching them in reverb . Well, heavy compression is doing the same thing (think Red Hot Chili Peppers), but the guy in the street doesn’t know it exists, because only musicians and engineers talk about it and know what it sounds like. By having every detail of the music upfront you can’t tell what’s important anymore and the listeners’ brains are too busy trying to make sense out of the mess, to make judgement about the musical program (the song, the performance, the production asf).

Thus for some years people made dry records in order to showcase their professionalism, but booming it all up to make it sound important and profound, when it might be just some willynilly (think about the loudest records you know).

I don‘t think it’s an MTV world anymore, but people start caring about hifi again and there is a way back. 15 years ago I would have been on the other side of the discussion - today even Metal fans complain. These are early signs of people feeling the toll of music that permanently screams at them or is reduced to constant whisper in the background, with no other options to be found.

The Exotic Guitar of Kahuna Kawentzmann

You can get the boy out of the Keynes era, but you can’t get the Keynes era out of the boy.

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Last edited: Sep 23, 2009 19:44:41

Mel
Of course it's not all about the gear but the topic is volume wars and that implies gear is going to be the main contributor. Certainly there are several things needed for a good recording.

Like a decent source, which would be the musicians themselves. From there, now you need some good gear (some for the band, some for recording). Next a person to mix the recorded sounds and finally, and almost always an entirely different person who can master the recording.

We may have better technology at home than the Beatles used to record with, but what we don't have is superior acoustic environments. It's very hard to really eradicate early reflections in a domestic room - and how many of us have access to a sound space like the live room at Abbey Road? These things are often what really sets a pro studio recording apart from a home produced one.

http://www.myspace.com/thepashuns

Youth and enthusiasm are no match for age and treachery.

MTV isn't to blame for the volume wars. Radio is. People compress the tracks to make them louder so they will stick out on radio. MTV is to blame for ridiculous over the top productions and fashions.