Loudness War: Thoughts?

[HarleyQuinn]

Given the fairly public outcry over Metallica's Death Magnetic, what are your thoughts on it? I love Oasis' What's the Story, Morning Glory? album but I don't think I've listened to it straight through in years since by song 7/8 I'm just tired of it despite liking it (same with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Californication).

I compared Nirvana's new deluxe Nevermind anniversary edition that was remastered and was surprised that most of the Dynamic Range hit between 6.5 and 7.5 on songs. Not surprisingly, the most listenable songs were Polly (8.7 left side, 8.5 right side) and Something In The Way (7.7 and 7.8) although SITW still sounded a little too loud.

For random comparison... I love fiddling with EQ in Audacity for various songs. Three songs I fiddled with came in at 12.0, 10.9, and 10.6 (Live performance) Dynamic Range for comparison purposes despite both peaking at almost 0.

http://www.dr.loudness-war.info/index.php (Unofficial DR Database). I've added multiple albums, interesting to see disparity between releases of the same album alone.

 

[Czech]

Yeah, abuse of dynamic compression is a scourge that's never going away. Shrug. Aja is the best mastering job of all time.

 

[Incandenza]

I guess no one will ever refix Iggy Pop's supposed fixing of Raw Power, though I don't know how much help that album can actually benefit from, given how it was recorded. A shame, because listening to RP—an album that begs to be played loud—at anything greater than a moderate level only induces headaches.

 

[HarleyQuinn]

Bumping this since I've been adding more albums to the Dynamic Range Database (Rasputina, N.W.A., and Eazy-E being the latest). The site is solid but lacks in some genres such as Country and Rap/Hip Hop.

From perusing the site, it seems like the shift starts around 1990/1991, picking up steam by 1995/1996 (heavily aided by Oasis IMO), and pretty much a normal by 1999/2000.

 

[HarleyQuinn]

Wrote up an article covering the Loudness War in a little more detail. Some interesting stuff, shame that some artists nowadays are still heavily slaves to the war while other artists actually are trying to become a little more balanced and listenable.