Evidence That The Loudness Wars May Finally Be Over

For way too long mixers and mastering engineers alike have been forced to squash songs before their final release, first in an effort to sound louder than everyone else's (especially on radio), then to just keep up in level with what's already out there.

But squashing a song to within an inch of its life may finally be counterproductive, as most digital services are now each employing their own brand of normalization in an effort to make all songs the same volume level for a better listening experience.

Here's a great video from UK mastering engineer Ian Shepherd that explains how it all works using a number of hits from U2 as an example. You can check out Ian's blog for a lot of great audio information at productionadvice.co.uk.

Let's hope that this is the first step in the return to dynamics in music.

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The Beginning Of The End Of The Loudness Wars

One of the cooler aspects of iTunes Radio is that it very well may be the beginning of the end to the loudness wars. For those of you too young to remember, the loudness wars started back in the 60s when producers began to perceive that if a song played on a radio was louder than the one before or after it, it seemed to sound better and people responded more. As a result, they kept on asking the mastering engineer to make their records as loud as possible (check out this post on hypercompression).

In the vinyl world, there was a physical limitation on how loud a record could be cut. Cut it too loud and the stylus would jump out of the record groove and the customer would return it. That all changed with music's entry into digital and the then-new look ahead digital limiters, which were capable of loudness levels that were unheard of just a few years before.

Now we've gotten to the point were some clients don't even care if there are overloads and distortion on the mastered track, as long as it's as loud as possible. Mastering engineers and mix engineers hate this, of course, but producers and record labels demand it, so the search for more perceived level has continued unabated. Until now.

iTunes Radio now includes a new Sound Check algorithm, which limits the volume level of all tracks. In other words, it lifts the level of the quiet tracks and lowers the level of louder ones so they're all the same. What makes this a threat to hypercompression is the fact that Sound Check can't be defeated by the listener, the mastering engineer, the producer or the record label. What's more, if a song is dynamically crushed, Sound Check might turn in down in a not exactly pleasing way, causing all parties involved to possibly rethink about going for so much level in the first place.

That said, iTunes Radio hasn't taken over the streaming world yet, and there are dozens of other services that don't use a similar level regulating algorithm. In many ways, it's still business as usual for mastering engineers everywhere, but at least we're seeing progress on this front for the first time. Here's to non-crushed, better sounding dynamic masters everywhere!

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Bob Ludwig On Mastering For Earbuds

In the world of audio mastering, there's none more esteemed than Bob Ludwig. Bob was a classically trained trumpet player before becoming a mastering engineer for producer Phil Ramone's A&R Recording, then eventually worked his way up to chief engineer at Masterdisk. In 1993 he built his own Gateway Mastering in Portland, Maine, which even though it's not in a main media center, still has a who's-who list of celebrity clients.

Recently Bob did an interview with the Huffington Post regarding separate "iPod mixes" and the loudness wars. You can read the entire interview here, as well as find the link for the second part of the interview.
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"Given how many people listen to music on portable digital players, do you find that producers are mixing for earbuds? Is it common to find an "iPod mix" that you master separately?
Bob Ludwig: No it isn't. Dr. Floyd Toole (of Harman International, the makers of JBL speakers) showed that averaging all the different consumer speakers (some bright, some with too much bass or midrange etc.) one ends up with a very flat curve which is empirical proof that mastering with an extremely accurate and flat playback system yields a product that sounds correct on more systems.

Like speakers, earbuds run the gamut from the old stock Apple earbuds that sounded tinny and lacking warmth to top-of-the-line Shure earbuds that are extremely accurate, to "hip-hop" earbuds that are overly bass heavy. One must master to sound as good as possible on all systems.

Almost all pop mixes are mixed with the bass and kick drum panned to the center which is proper as many people will be listening on boom boxes which have limited power and having a powerful center channel bass available to both speakers is ideal. Very early recordings of The Rolling Stones and The Beatles (to name two groups) were totally intended for mono and were recorded on 2-channel or 3-channel tape decks solely for creating a mono-only mix. When stereo became popular these early multi-track tapes were re-purposed for stereo and the bass and kick drum were typically locked into either the right or left channel.

With earbuds and headphones, this is very unnatural sounding and sometimes it is decided to filter the low bass into the center by mono-ing the signal somewhat. This sounds much better. This is definitely a decision based on current widespread use of earbuds, and it remains an important philosophical question when doing re-issues of old recordings with this problem.

Can you explain how the "loudness" of a mix becomes a factor in mastering? Can you explain compression and how it affects you at the mastering stage?
Bob Ludwig: Compression uses a piece of hardware or software plug in which either enhances or most often limits the dynamic range of the music being fed into it. Compression is crucial to pop music. Live pop music is almost always performed at hearing damaging levels, way above the 85dB SPL OSHA threshold for start of possible hearing loss. In order for this immense power to be even somewhat realistically reproduced on consumer systems the pop sound pipeline must be compressed so that musically the performance has the extra energy that the live performance had. For pop music, this translates as a very musical thing. ("The Loudness Wars" video illustrates.)

This problem starts from the fact that human beings, when hearing two examples of the exact same musical program but with one turned up only +0.5 or 1dB, almost all listeners who don't know exactly what they are hearing choose the louder one as "sounding best." Fair enough.

So through the years, the louder example is eclipsed by a yet louder example winning the hearts and minds of the artist, the engineer and the A&R person. At some point, the music is so loud and unnaturally compressed that the aural assault on the ear, while very impressively loud, has sucked the life out of the music and makes the listener subconsciously not want to hear the music again.
At an Audio Engineering Society workshop I was recently in about loudness, Susan Rogers from Berklee College talked about the hair cells in our ears that receive music and she pointed out that loud compressed music does not "change" as much as dynamic music and notes that "we habituate to a stimulus if it stops changing. Change 'wakes up' certain cells that have stopped firing. This is cognitively efficient and therefore automatic."

In other words, there are very physical reasons why too much compression turns off our music receptors. Every playback system ever manufactured comes with a playback level control. If one is listening to an album, one should be able to turn that control anywhere you want and the absolute level on the CD should not make a difference. Another place level on a CD does not make the difference one would think is on radio broadcast. It can be shown that in general, loud CDs sound worse and less powerful on commercial FM radio than a CD with a moderate level that lets the radio station compressors handle the loudness problem. Non-classical radio station compressors make soft things loud and loud things soft.

Two areas where producers get upset about not having enough level is the iTunes Shuffle, or even comparing songs on the iTunes software itself, and that moment at the radio station where the PD is going through the week's new releases and deciding which two or three songs will be added to his playlist. Here, sometimes having a little extra level can make a lesser song seem a little more impressive, at least at first listen.

A great example of a contemporary recording that has full dynamic range is the Guns N' Roses Chinese Democracy CD where Axl Rose wanted all the textures of the original mixes to come through and he got his wish! A good example of one of the loudest most distorted CDs is the Metallica Death Magnetic CD where apparently 10,000 fans signed a web petition to have the album remixed because they got to hear how good it sounded on Guitar Hero which did not have all the digital limiters the final CD mix had."

Read more of the interview here. You can also read an interview excerpt that Bob did for The Audio Mastering Handbook here.

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Help support this blog. Any purchases made through our Amazon links help support this website with no cost to you.


You should follow me on Twitter for daily news and updates on production and the music business.


Don't forget to check out my Music 3.0 blog for tips and tricks on navigating social media and the new music business.