More on the Loudness War

More on Loudness War
The following post appeared on the Yahoo Group Forum
for RERmegacorp (Chris Cutler-Henry Cow etc) today-
thought it might be of interest 

Over to Bob Drake

"If you don't know what I mean by "volume war", just skip to the links
at the bottom of this post and have a look.

Just doing my small part to help spread the word about this ridiculous
problem, which is one of, if not THE top reason why so many CDs sound
so terrible. As an engineer and musician this naturally concerns me
very much; how do you explain to a band whose album you've just mixed
or mastered that there is nothing "wrong" with their CD, the problem
is all the other CDs which have been ruined by brutal hard limiting
for no other reason than to make them as loud as other ruined CDs?

I've been fortunate in that most groups and labels I work with as an
engineer trust me enough about this, but it has happened that a band
will take the perfectly good master I've sent them and have it
remastered volume-war style even if they don't like the result, just
because they think they have to or because a friend told them it
wasn't as loud as other (volume war destroyed) CDs in their
collection. It's about to happen now with a master I just spent weeks
carefully mixing; all the care and detail - not to mention two and a
half weeks of time - I put into it were for nothing.

So I'm going to be doing a bit more to encouarge artists, labels and
listeners to learn about this problem. I could go on and on about it
but other folks have already posted some great examples and articles,
here are some:

The Loudness War. Very good YouTube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

IEEE article on the loudness war:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aug07/5429

Over The Limit: excellent, classic article about the volume war:
http://www.prorec.com/Articles/tabid/109/EntryID/247/Default.aspx

Short Term Gain/Long Term Pain:
http://gboers.xs4all.nl/daisy/home/g3/139/loudnesswar.html

Death of Dynamic Range:
http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/dynamics/dynamics.htm

I Want to Break Free of the Volume War. Another good Youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkkqsN69Jac

Here is my own little example:
http://www.bdrak.com/other/mastering/examples.htm

That's it for now, happy listening!
Bob Drake
www.bdrak.com

Here's another:
http://www.turnmeup.org/

Moderator Comment:  Links changed to make them work   - you need to watch those spaces!

Thank you, Beetle, for valuable information.

Preparing for the holiday season is challenging enough in my profession (church music), but the loudness war affects even this.  As we listen to literally hours of Nashville studio demo recordings, some pop/rock band, some orchestral, some combined, of new church music, once in awhile we just have to pause and clear the air.  It doesn't matter how gently we set the volume control, some of these tracks are mastered to such a brick wall that the constancy of it grates after awhile.  And this is supposed to help us want to buy the sheet music!  It's also amusing to hear the entire mix modulated by kick drum hits because the headroom is so far gone, there's nothing else that can happen except to lose the rest of the mix for that instant.  Amazing, these releases are heard by few outside of church musicians.  But the same problem abounds, and from one publisher in particular you can count on it being especially annoyingly aggressive.

Anyway, my little 2 cents.  Thanks again, Beetle.  I hope someone listens to him.