LOUDNESS!!!!!!!

Friday, 03. 19. 2010

Often people like to listen to their music LOUD, it’s always been this way.

The first thing my 3yr old daughter says when I put on the stereo in the car is- “Louder Daddy!”

We like to be able to hear all parts in a song, all the details.

It’s quite easy to make a song quite loud these days, it’s more difficult to make something  Loud and sound good!

But every song has a point, a threshold, where no matter what you do, after this point, every increment in volume is a sacrifice in the sound quality.

So once you reach that point you need to ask yourself “why do I need it louder?”

1. I want it to be as loud as track “x”.

I may be strange, but when I listen to music, an album or a single, I put it on and then decide at what volume I want to listen to it at.  It doesn’t matter if what I was previously listening to was louder or quieter.  I like to listen to music from various genres and various years, all of which have variations in volume. Sometimes I want something on in background, sometimes I want to do nothing but play it loud and listen to it.

But I determine the volume level at which I’m listening.

2. I want it to sound good on the Radio!.

Radio stations apply various processors to the sound before it reaches our ears. e.g. Multi-band compressors and Limiters.

The company Orban is a leading manufacture of those type’s of processors for the radio industry. Here is a report explaining what happens to your songs: Link

Extract:

“Excessive digital limiting of the source material
radically reduces this short-term peak-to-average ratio and presents the broadcast
processor with a new, synthetic type of source that the broadcast processor handles less
gracefully and naturally than it handles older material. Instead of being punchy, the onair
sound produced from these hypercompressed sources is small and flat, without the
dynamic contours that give music its dramatic impact. The on-air sound resembles
musical wallpaper and makes the listener want to turn down the volume control to
background levels.”

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This is not to say all compression and limiting is evil!

Compressors are excellent creative tools and there are certain sonic aesthetics that can only be achieved by pushing compressors/limiters to their limits!

But the practice of needlessly degrading a song you’ve spent so much time (and/or money) on,  is completely insane.

I have never heard one single logical, reasonable or technical argument that demonstrated the positives of excessive processing for loudness purposes.

Mastering Engineer Greg Reierson:

“There is just no musical reason to throw away so much of the sound so the listener can keep her volume knob at 3 instead of 5. I do think we will look back at this loud era as an experiment gone bad.”

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Some more info:

http://www.chicagomasteringservice.com/loudness.html (there are a few links at the bottom of that page also.)

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Greg Calbi on loudness- LINK

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http://soundzoo.squarespace.com/features/2009/12/15/war-of-the-levels.html

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