Metal Underground

Dynamic Range Day: Loudness still an issue says organiser

As this year’s Dynamic Range Day (DRD) is marked with a wealth of awareness-raising online activity, mastering engineer Ian Shepherd claims that although an increasing number of musicians and engineers are expressing their weariness of the “crushed, lifeless, loudness war sound,” many mainstream releases are still “ending up completely squashed anyway”.

Instigated by Shepherd in 2010, DRD encourages recording, mixing and mastering engineers to be mindful of over-compression and aim for an overall dynamic range of at least 8dB (DR8). The majority of mainstream releases, he says, are still averaging DR6 or less – Biffy Clyro’s Opposites, David Bowie’s The Next Day and Thom Yorke side project Atoms for Peace’s AMOK being recent examples.

It’s a persistent tendency that, argues Shepherd, runs counter to a “groundswell of opinion” about loudness in recorded music, as illustrated by new cross-industry initiative the Music Loudness Alliance (MLA). Drawing together audio technical and production experts including European Broadcasting Union PLOUD Group chair Florian Camerer and mastering legend Bob Ludwig, the MLA’s recently issued White Paper urges loudness normalisation of file-based music along the lines of the ITU-R BS.1700-2 standard being implemented for international broadcasting.

The supposed link between loudness and sales is also looking increasingly tenuous, says Shepherd. Topping the Billboard 200 on its release in May 2012, former White Stripes frontman Jack White’ critically acclaimed solo album, Blunderbuss, averages DR11 on the Pleasurize Music Foundation’s TT Dynamic Range Meter.

Such developments lead Shepherd to believe that, despite the current ubiquity of overly compressed music, the loudness wars could soon just be “one of those things we laugh about. The challenge we face is to minimise the damage done to our music in the meantime.”

Ian Shepherd is also working with Ian Kerr from MeterPlugs on a new plug-in, Perception, that is designed to allow users to hear their music in the same way as a mastering engineer.

Perception bears "no agenda,” asserts Shepherd, “so you can use Perception to get the best possible results making your music really loud if that’s what you want. But as with the TT meter, I think once people start using it they’ll find they actually choose to squash things less, not more, because it makes them sound better – especially in the ‘real world’ of streaming and broadcast. The TT meter has been na amazing wat of raising awareness of the issues over the last few years, helping people to learn all about loudness now my hope is that Perception can take this to another level."

"I am a little surprised how little this is discussed among the metal community (or music community in general). So here we go...
After the CD as a digital medium got popular in the 80's, new possibilities opened up to producers and musicians. Because the human ear superficially rates louder music as sounding better, a "race" for the loudest mix started. But as the CD is digital it has a maximum level that cannot be exceeded, so producers started to use dynamic compression (i.e. making quiet parts louder and loud parts quieter) in order to raise the average loudness. However, this caused an irreversible lack of dynamic range which caused the music to sound flat and soulless. Since metal usually doesn't have that much dynamic range, the effect wasn't as prominent on metal releases at first (only the drum hits got cut out). But many producers pushed it more and more to the point where even metal releases started to sound crappy.
If anyone wants more information on that, on youtube there are enough example videos to explain the effect which can be visualized very well in sound editing software like Audacity.
Examples for especially badly mixed albums are Death Magnetic and the new Black Sabbath album '13'. But also most of the modern extreme metal releases suffer from this (pretty much all death metal albums for example). Sure, everything is supposed to be "loud" there, but that's why there is a volume knob. Dynamic compression beyond a certain point (which is individual for each genre or even recording) destroys the mix and makes listening stressful.

What are your thoughts on this? Why are you (i.e. most music fans) so oblivious of this?"
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