Loudness War and Dynamic Range

[stargazer916]

What are your opinions on this epidemic that has been sweeping through music over the last 10-15 years? Feel free to list examples of albums with great dynamic range and albums that suffer from loudness. A few examples of albums that suffer from loudness are.

Metallica-Death Magnetic (2008)
Red Hot chili peppers-Californication (1999)
iggy and the stooges-Raw Power (1997 remaster)
Just about all of megadeth's 2004 remix and remastered albums
Rush-Vapor trails (2002)

 

[Riff Raff]

Death Magnetic is a classic example, on top of the other production problems it has with it like the overbearing drums in the mix that sound tinny.
I thought Ozzy Osbourne Scream was another example too.

 

[stargazer916]

This is a cool site i found if you are interested to find out if your album suffers from loudness or not.

DR Database

 

[Cosmic Harmony]

"Death Magnetic" is probably the biggest mamma jamma or the loudness war, yeah. I think Wolfmother's debut is OUTRAGEOUSLY loud too. Even without being lumped in with the loudness war however pretty much every album that comes out nowadays is louder than albums of yesteryear.

 

[Aero]

This is a cool site i found if you are interested to find out if your album suffers from loudness or not.

DR Database

Nice find.

Can you explain what some of those columns mean?

* Bad - Transition - Good

* Lossy/Lossless

 

[stargazer916]

The bad column in red are albums that are badly compressed and super loud. Transition is albums that are for the most part good but might have one or 2 songs that are real loud.good are albums that have very high dynamic range. U can download a program called foobar and scan your albums. Lossy is more like mp3 files I believe where lossless is flac and vinyl type files

 

[LG]

This is all i-tunes fault, at least that's how I look at it. They mess around with ramping up the sound levels so everyone with i-pods gets the most sound for the money.

I'm not going to recite my usual litany about what the idiots are doing in the studios these days, but I will say this, Kid Rock records his albums on old analog gear, and then they transfer it to digital format. Why?? Because he can tell the difference and is totally unsatisfied with the digital processes.

We all have bias/volume controls at our disposal, why on earth the morons releasing albums totally out of whack is beyond me. There are a few engineers with state of the art equipment that have re-released albums like Death Magnetic with a proper balance and they sound infinitely better than the studio release.

 

[Riff Raff]

Magnetic is probably the one album Rick Rubin has produced that seems like a major stumble in his time. He probably wanted it to be as loud as possible which is quite ludicrous.
Although there are albums that suffer the opposite problem, are way too quiet on the mix that requires a huge volume increase just to have somewhat decent volume.

 

[LG]

^^Indeed I did expect better of Rick Rubin. I know what you are saying about some recordings being too quiet, but I'll take those 10/10 times over a botched overamped recording anyday. You can adjust the gain up on a quiet recording to make it listenable, you cannot do much with an album that's ruined with too much gain and no dynamic headroom whatsoever.

 

[Riff Raff]

Twisted Sister Stay Hungry is the main example for me of an album thats far too quiet. I understand what you mean that you can adjust it upwards which is easier but for that album it requires near full volume on the PC and the speakers to hear it for me and I got good hearing. I like Rick Rubin as a producer but he really did mess up with DM. I also get what you mean by compressed sound quality, DM is also very much compressed especially in Lars drum sound. Everything on the album sounds like it was compressed, only thing that doesn't is the bass which is good and despite how fine people are with And Justice, I am not fine with the bass being so thin in the mix, its not excusable to have that level of production flaw on such an album like that. Actually being 1988 that can kinda be lenient but if bands do that in the modern era that is inexcusable.