The battle over loudness

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Originally uploaded by pierre-jean G.

You may not realize it, but, if you're listening to music, you're taking part in an ongoing battle over its sonic features that has been brewing since recording entered the digital age. The fight has played out over the characteristic termed the "dynamic range" of recorded music, which is a measure of the contrast between the loudest and quietest portions of a composition. It appears to be a three-way competition that may leave the typical consumer in danger of simply becoming tired of music in general.

Recorded music has always had the ability to swing between barely audible to loud enough to cause pain when kept on a single volume setting. But according to the IEEE publication Spectrum, that loudness has been limited by the media music was distributed on in the past. Louder music requires larger grooves to be cut in vinyl, essentially limiting the amount of loud music that would fit on a single side of an LP record. As such, there were clear advantages to limiting the total loudness of a collection of music.

Those advantages have evaporated as recording technology has kept signals in digital form from start to finish; there is essentially no penalty to making a song or a collection of tracks consistently loud. In fact, there may be marketing advantages, as a loud track is more likely to grab the attention of listeners. Given that the highest-volume portions of tracks are already pushing levels that might induce hearing damage (which is bad for sales in the long term), studios have increased average loudness by reducing the dynamic range of recordings. Quiet portions are boosted, and loud regions receive a relative reduction, essentially producing a track that's all loud.

Studios have apparently latched on to this attention-grabbing technique, as the article cites figures that indicate the average loudness of a CD has increased tenfold since the 1980s. But a large market segment may also be benefiting, as these increases have accompanied the rise of the iPod and other personal audio players. Anyone who has tried to listen to classical music (which has retained a wide dynamic range) on rapid transit can attest to the advantages of a reduced dynamic range. The wide difference in loudness within most classical music turns what's intended to be a relaxing experience into one that requires near-constant interventions with the volume control.

The clear losers in the loudness war are those who value the music-listening experience the most: the audiophiles. Those who have purchased high-end equipment and carefully arranged their listening environment to get the most out music's contrasts find themselves bombarded with sound that's been adjusted to work well on the N train. But the article suggests that the other sides in this three-way struggle might be losing as well. Comparing the "all loud" sound to being constantly yelled at, it concludes that even average listeners might be suffering from music fatigue (though it provides no figures to back that claim up). This ultimately may be hurting the studios by contributing to the reduced sales that have been plaguing them.

I would have preferred to see hard numbers, but the argument makes a degree of intuitive sense. As always, technology may ultimately provide a solution, as chips that can compress dynamic range on the fly should make subway-appropriate loudness an option for those carrying their music into noisy environments. But those solutions will need to rely on studios returning to music with a wide enough dynamic range that it needs this sort of adjustment. Given their shortsightedness in many digital matters, that's anything but guaranteed.

Note: "Loudness" is used here is a shorthand term for a compressed dynamic range that reduces differences between relatively high and low volume portions of a single track.

Source Ars Technica

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