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For nearly three decades now there has been an invisible war being fought in every home with a CD Player, Stereo, Tape Deck, Amplifier, Television, Surround system, DVD player… Any machine where music can be played and heard.

This isn’t a physical war where politicians piss testosterone over landmass, the captured are interrogated for military secrets and the wounded bleed then die.

This is a war over sound. Over decibels. Over audible clarity.

There’s an old saying that goes; “If its too loud, You’re too old!” Maybe that, like most things should be brought into the new century with everything else, with digital recording and digital engineering, digital mastering. Maybe that saying should go a little more like;
“If its not loud enough, I can turn it up myself!”

For decades music producers and engineers have tried to take their profession and art to the next level and in doing so take the music they engineer with them. And what have they really done in 30 years of musical and digital evolution and progression?
Turned it up.

This is largely at the behest of Record Labels that don't know a thing about music and care only about revenue, cashing in on ‘trends’ and milking that trend for all its worth while they can until the next trend comes along, but always wanting to be the loudest CD in the collection, to the media moguls, “Louder is Better”.
If theirs is the loudest CD in the collection, they are happy and this often leaves many engineers and producers in a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation.

Overdriven levels, overdriven gain. So the CD you put into your player without physically touching the audio controls automatically sounds punchier, louder. Or so it would seem, at first.

At first with most listeners this was somewhat welcome, they could listen to their bands of choice in the car, with headphones down a busy street and wouldn’t even need to miss a quiet part of a certain song, it was all at the same level. But then that accentuated the problem at home, it all sounded the same, quiet interludes weren’t quiet anymore, they were just as loud as the rest of the song or album. There was no discernable difference except as each album got louder something became more and more apparent and recognizable .
Unwelcome Static.
Unwelcome Distortion.

And something major was lost;
Distinction.
Clarity.
The ability for an album or individual songs for that matter to build to crescendo’s is all but lost because they cannot get any louder, if everything is set to high, there can be no low’s, so while songs/albums may indeed have crescendo’s they have lost all relevance and impact. It is all lost in the producing/engineering/mastering.

The advent of MP3’s meant the situation worsened, for an MP3 file to keep to such a small file size it needs to literally strip a layer of sound off the top, in some cases that layer was distinguished as the ‘Dolby hiss’ that can be heard on cassette’s and wasn’t really missed, but as the compression made MP3’s smaller, so too did something have to give, and that was quality.

One of the most famous perpetrators of this “war” to date is Metallica’s Death Magnetic. The moment it was released there were cries of just how bad it sounded, not the songs, the songs for the most part were arguably the best Metallica had produced in nearly -if not more than- a decade. So what was the problem with Death Magnetic?
Why did it ‘sound’ like shit?
The production?
The engineering?
The mastering?
Some … All of the above?

It wasn't the songs that were at fault though, when a version of Guitar Hero was released with tracks from Death Magnetic, they sounded better… Sharper. It turned out that the songs given to the Guitar Hero makers were, in point of fact, re-mastered and re-engineered. So why not re-engineer and re-master the entire album? Because the thirteen thousand or so that had already signed an online petition to have this done were deemed ‘an insignificant amount’… Not enough to fix something that was clearly broken? It was damaged goods before you even took it off the store shelf, yet you can’t get it repaired or replaced and a refund? Good luck with that.

How many names will it take to convince an artist or band that what they’re doing is simply wrong? That allowing their music to be overdriven past acceptable and endurable peaks of audible quality they are risking more than that to simply sound ‘new’.
They are risking the respect of those buying their albums. Something far greater than just putting out a bad album, a bad album or patch of albums can be forgiven, its even expected for that artist or band so they can not only recover but evolve into something better. Insulting your listeners, your fans, that is not so easy to recover from. Is it really worth it?

The revolution has begun, more and more people are buying SACD’s(Super Audio Compact Discs), are downloading Lossless file formats like .FLAC, .APE, .OGG, .M4A, etc, instead of .MP3 or at the least are opting for the higher quality .Mp3@320 instead of the dodgy VBR(Variable Bit Rate). Because the quality of the production matters as much if not more now than ever as the actual music itself.

If its not loud enough, turn it up yourself.

Links of interest;

Over The Limit

Justice For Audio

Rolling Stone - The Death Of High Fidelity

Turn Me Up

Article: The Future of music

Metallica Death Magnetic - CD vs. "Guitar Hero" comparison

The Petition to re-mix or re-master the Death Magnetic Album