A Casualty of the Loudness Wars

This is a screenshot showing a waveform sample from one of the songs on Metallica's new album, Death Magnetic. This should give you an idea of how overly-compressed the sound is.

This gets to the heart of something called "the loudness wars." This has been a serious problem for the music industry, especially in the past decade. Here's how it means. Record companies are in a furious pursuit against one another to make songs and albums that sound louder and louder. But there is a certain limit to your volume when creating CD's. Despite being marketed as superior to analog vinyl lp's, the compact disc has serious limitations. It's a small space to squeeze all that music in.

When music producers make the albums "louder," what they are doing is stretching the sound, stretching it out. What this does is squeeze out the dynamic range - the difference between loud and quiet. As the music is stretched and compressed further and further, you run up against that noise ceiling, and distortion is the result.

It would be the same if I were to SHOUT ALL THE TIME HOW WOULD YOU LIKE IT IF I WROTE LIKE THIS AND ALWAYS SHOUT AND NEVER USE PUNCTUATION AND NEVER PAUSE TO CATCH MY BREATH HA HA HA I DON'T HAVE TO PAUSE TO BREATHE WHEN I WRITE BY THE WAY WHAT IS THE DEAL WITH THE MINNESOTA TWINS HAVE THEY FINALLY RUN OUT OF STEAM AND OH LOOK IT IS RAINING OUTSIDE!!!!!!!!!

Ahem. I think you get the idea.

Normally, a wafeform would show peaks and valleys, as this example from Bryan Adams' first album back in the 1980's demonstrates:

Here, you can see the music represented as a rolling wave. There are louder and quieter moments, they instruments are very distinct, the drums have a clear snap...it all sounds like music. You can also see that plenty of space is left at the top and bottom, preventing any clipping or distortion. Unlike the vinyl lp, this limit for digital CD's cannot be breached.

Over the past 10-15 years, the music industry has steadily increased the volume. They want product that is loud and grabs your attention immediately. And true to their nature as capitalists, they cannot see anything except the bottom line, to the point where music today is almost completely unlistenable.

Compare the two waveform samples. Can you understand when I say this new Metallica album is almost completely unlistenable? This is the reason why the music business is going bankrupt. Sales of CD's have plummeted for years, and sales of mp3's on such sites as Apple's iTunes, while increasing, have not made up the difference. The reality is that more and more people are simply being turned away. The talent is lacking. The quality is poor. The product is shoddy. The music is nonexistent.

What we're getting today is not music. It's haze, distortion, and something barely resembling a backbeat. It's as though we're all listening through straws and getting headaches in the process. I can't believe my ears would hurt from sitting on a couch, ten feet away from the speakers, from D-Mag. I can blast any number of heavy rock or jazz albums at high volume, and never feel the pain. Your ears are built for that. That's what they are evolved to do. You don't hear distortion everytime an airplane flies by, or anytime you are stuck in traffic. You can handle loud. You cannot handle the Loudness Wars.

There are, thankfully, people working in the music industry who decry this trend, and are true defenders of the music. They are still very much in the minority at this time. And one of the very worst offenders, a musical zen-guru who has never touched a mixing board in his life, has just handed us the worst-sounding album in Metallica's career. Thank you very much, Rick Rubin!