The Loudness Wars, What Went Wrong with CD Sound

Why Modern CDs can be Fatiguing or Don't Always Sound Right

Mar 14, 2009

Pure Perfect Sound Forever was promised with CD, but misguided mastering is destroying the sound of CDs for short-term commercial gain at the expense of listenability.

Something isn't right with the sound of many rock and pop CDs now. They're just too loud, as mastering engineers crank up the sound listeners are getting fatigued. Tragically, nearly everybody with a long-term stake in good sound is losing out.

Artistically, music needs the soft to balance the loud, and the life is being squeezed out of the sound as record companies and in some cases producers race to have the loudest songs on the dial.

Loudness Wars - Why are CDs getting Louder?

When two sounds follow each other, people tend to be drawn towards the louder sound. This is a physiological effect, but it has always caused problems when musicality meets commercial interests. Radio stations vied with each other from the 1970s on to be the loudest sounds on the dial as listeners tuned across the band.

Now record labels push their engineers to make their CDs sound louder than anyone else's. While this may make their CDs stand out, the tragedy is that it is the paying listener who is short-changed. The short term impression may be louder is better, but after the second track or so the lack of musical dynamics starts to make things sound similar, and fatigue starts to set in after a while.

How can Mastering Make CDs Louder?

A CD player has a maximum output level which is defined by the manufacturer and the CD standard, and this is similar across all CD players. The perception of loudness can be increased by simply boosting the quieter passages or taking down some of the peaks, effectively compressing the recording's range of loud and soft.

Compression has always been used in recording - used well a little compression can make individual tracks in the mix sound better and vocals sound fuller. But like any effect it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

Compressing the combined mix in particular reduces the contrast between loud and soft, but it takes away one of the dimensions to the music. More recent processors can compress different parts of the frequency spectrum differently, to maximise the loudness of the recording even more.

Is the Way We Listen Part of the Problem?

We listen to more music now than in the past, but perhaps modern listeners do not listen as intently to rock and pop music as they did in the past. As Mat Serletic, former Virgin USA CEO said in Rolling Stone's "The Death of High Fidelity" diatribe on the Loudness Wars -

"In the Seventies and Eighties, you were expected to pay attention. Modern music should be able to get your attention."

There is a world of difference between sitting down to listen to a CD on the best audio system one can afford, and hearing the same album on an Ipod while on the train to work. Perhaps uncompressed digital downloads are the answer, a premium product for those who do care.

Uncompressed, that is, in both the non-MP3 sense of the word and uncompressed in dynamics. The good news is that the Loudness Wars are largely a problem in final mastering, and so such options are still possible in future if a niche audience cares enough to pay more for it.

The copyright of the article The Loudness Wars, What Went Wrong with CD Sound in Music Technology is owned by Richard Mudhar. Permission to republish The Loudness Wars, What Went Wrong with CD Sound in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.