Music is a series of waves moving through the air that make our eardrum move so we can hear it. Well, all sound is really, from your dads “pull my finger” explosion to the sound of a train in the distance, to your favorite band live on stage. These waves are recorded in a studio with electronic equipment so that other electronic equipment can reproduce it for you to listen to when ever you feel like it. Cause hauling a band around in the back of your geo metro is not the easy to do.
Ok, I could be off there... some music is recorded live, sure. Either with good equipment, or the tape deck you have taped to your butt. But lets just talk about studio music here for this post.
In a studio, the engineer, producer and band all work together to get that band's “sound” on record. Now days it's usually done with digital equipment, but it used to be all analog with the stuff recorded to a wide spool of magnetic tape. Magnetic tape allowed the engineer to do some tricks that cant be done with digital these days. If you push more sound onto tape than actually fits on the tape, you get distortion that sort of smears the sound. In small doses it actually sounds pretty good to us. That distortion is what makes analog sound “warm” to us. But when you do the same thing to digital, it makes a sound a lot like listening to your computer modem on dial up... it is friggin awful. Not only does it not sound “warm” it doesn't sound like anything pleasant at all. Its hissy, screechy noise. So engineers really try hard to not let that happen.
The problem is, producers and some bands want everything louder, pushed as close to that horrible screech without going over as they can get it. Sometimes they goof. Not only is it louder, sometimes its screechy too. Metallica's newest album, Death Magnetic, is a very good example of this. It's really loud, and in a lot of places, it is too loud. Some people don't seem to mind, but a lot of us do. Now if you rip it to mp3 and play it on your discount, knock off iPod, you might not be able to hear it. But on a good home system, its pretty awful. Which is a pity, there are some great songs on Death Magnetic.
Metallica is just another victim of the loudness war. It's hard to say who goofed here, and not the purpose of this blog to point fingers at all. It is just a good example of what can happen.
So why push everything so loud? Well, a lot of people seem to follow the theory that louder is better. Certainly, the quiet parts are a lot harder to hear in your car with the windows down in heavy traffic. So the thought was “if we make the quiet parts louder, people can hear them better”. It actually sort of works. The problem is that when you aren't in your car, there are far less dynamics from quiet to loud. The distance between quiet and all knobs on 11 is way less. So two things happen. The music comes out as a sort of solid stream, it doesn't build up and fade back to create tension. When the soft guitar jumps to the singer screaming all out it doesn't blow you back in your seat like it used to. The second thing is it makes our ears fatigue faster, so we don't feel like listening as long. And that sucks.
So making things louder over all isn't really like turning the volume knob all the way up. It's a lot more like putting your favorite song on Ritalin... no excitement. Just there. Boring.
Now, if you had the same song with more dynamics, it feels more alive, more energetic. If you have remasters of some old stuff and the original versions, you can probably compare for yourself. The remaster is probably a lot louder, but doesn't have as wide a space between loud and quiet. Not every remaster has been compressed like this though, so you might hit a freak that managed to not be a casualty of the loudness war. A good example might be the new Beatles box set... I have not heard it yet, but I am suspicious its been compressed and made louder.
Now that we have these basics covered, I will probably come back to this again in a few posts. More than likely, I will get all cheesed off when I hear one of my favorite songs remastered louder and come back here and post a heck of a rant again.
Til then, try to keep track of your marbles!
