They don't make music like they used to
Posted: February 8th, 2019, 12:40 am
This is a fairly involved article. I'm a pretty critical reader but I couldn't find anything to nitpick on this. Maybe one of our experts can read it in its entirety and weigh in (link at bottom). I was surprised to see ChrisJ featured prominently in the article -- I probably shouldn't have been.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/07/opin ... e=Homepage[...]
Several years ago, Chris Johnson, an audio software developer, tested a theory, espoused by some anti-loudness activists, that the hyper-compression roiling the industry was partly to blame for shortened careers. Using a list of all-time best-selling recordings, he rearranged them by “commercial importance,” assigning each a score derived by multiplying an album’s number of platinum certifications (how many millions sold) by the number of years it had been on the market. These were records that were not merely popular — they also displayed longevity. He then used software to analyze the sound waves of each album.
His findings revealed they had a common trait: these albums, even across genres, had extraordinary dynamic range. The most commercially important albums, he wrote, featured lots of “high contrast” moments, when “the transient attacks of instruments” — very brief outbursts of high energy — were allowed to stand out against “the background space where the instruments are placed.” This was especially true for vocals and percussion (one of the more intriguing similarities, from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” involved what Mr. Johnson called the “hit record drum sound”). Loudness has its place, but most of us like our music to have breathing room, so that our eardrums are constantly tickled by little sonic explosions. In a tight, compressed space, music can get asphyxiated.
Topping Mr. Johnson’s commercially important list, just ahead of Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album, was the Eagles’ “Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975).” “It’s gratifying, but unsurprising,” Mr. Johnson wrote, “to discover that the single most commercially important album in R.I.A.A. history contains some of the most striking dynamic contrasts pop music’s ever seen.”
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The war never really ended, but it has evolved. Streaming services like Spotify now “normalize” the music’s output, so that we aren’t always adjusting our volume settings. This should lessen the incentive for mastering engineers to abuse compression. But according to Bob Ludwig, one of the industry’s pre-eminent mastering engineers (and a winner of Grammys for Best Engineered Album for artists like Alabama Shakes, Beck and Daft Punk), this hasn’t stopped mixing engineers from ladling on the loudness, reducing the dynamic range of the music even as the streaming normalization defeats their purpose. “The loudness war is worse than ever,” he recently told me. “It is a super-discouraging situation.”
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