The Loudness War

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of music production in this day and age is the subject of mastering. People started really making a fuss following the release of Metallica’s notoriously wretched-sounding Death Magnetic and since then everyone seems to have formulated an opinion.

Mastering is the final stage in the processing of a piece of audio before it’s manufactured to CD, vinyl or whatever it is that it’s being printed to. Even mp3s were mastered prior to encoding, and there is a reason for this. When a producer or mix engineer is making a record, they are not necessarily thinking of continuity from track to track, and even if they are it’s still difficult to have every song come out sounding exactly alike and with the exact same volume. Not to mention that while they’ve made the material sound as perfect as they can, they can’t possibly know how it will sound on every system that people will listen to it on.

Releasing this material untouched would be a bit of a disaster! That’s what the mastering engineer is for, and these guys have trained not only to make the music sound consistent and balanced but also be able to process it so it will translate well to as many systems as possible, be they smacking subwoofer powered PAs or tinny iPod styled ear-bud headphones.

Most mastering engineers truly want the music to come out of their suite sounding as good as is humanly possible... The problems arise when record company people and/or artists themselves push the engineer to make their record louder. For commercial music of any variety, getting extreme volume to disk seems to be the norm, as everyone wants to hear their song come onto the radio sounding louder than the song prior. But as consumers have begun to notice, there is a limit as to how loud one can make a CD before the audio quality is compromised.

There is also the issue of ear fatigue caused by exposure to ridiculously loud material for too long, as many modern disks have no dynamic variance whatsoever and are in the red for their entire duration. For an example of this see Justin Timberlake’s Futuresex Lovesounds, which is as loud as possible from start to finish! This is clearly not a very clever idea and results in a poor listening experience (as does the fact that the content is absolute rubbish, but that’s another point entirely…)

This said, there are times when creating an extreme listening experience is appropriate. You would certainly be confused should you happen upon a “nice sounding” death metal album, for example. Even Sigur Rós benefit from flatlining their audio in moments such as the end of ‘Glósóli’ from Takk, which sounds comparatively weaker on the more conservatively mastered vinyl edition. I guess the impetus now lies with the artists and execs to decide what is tasteful and appropriate for the music they’re presenting.

Artists such as Tori Amos and Massive Attack have consistently ensured that their music is mastered without Brick Wall Limiting, as compressing for maximum volume is termed. But until the point that every artist is able to make those decisions people who want more dynamic music may need to turn to vinyl, where flatlining is virtually impossible because it would render the disks unplayable, thus demanding that separate masters are cut especially. Vinyl also tends to sound better, but that’s for another day… In any case, it will be interesting to see how things change in the post-Death Magnetic era!