http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LoudnessWar

note after Chinese Democracy was actually released four years American Idiot , but the engineer apparently knew what he was doing. Top: Dynamic range. Bottom: Dynamic pain.

Meat Loaf "I like my music like I like my life — everything louder than everything else."

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Before we begin, this article isn't about cranking up your stereo; it's about the music itself and the media it's etched or printed onto, and how it can make the act of cranking up your stereo have no effect. This non-effect is called clipping and is usually a result of excessive loudness.

Also, note that this article is extremely technical and the majority of music listeners will simply not care or roll their eyes at the technical mumbo jumbo audiophiles use. Except in the absolute worst cases, the issues of loudness and clipping may be largely unobtrusive unless you know what to listen for and have high-end speakers or at least decent-quality headphones. (The effects are particularly annoying on high-quality headphones, perhaps unsurprisingly; conversely, on all but perhaps the highest-end car stereos, the loudness war's effects will probably remain comparatively subtle except in the absolute worst cases.note The effects of dynamic range compression are usually much more immediate on headphones because the audio source is right next to your ears. With speakers, on the other hand, the left and right channels will inevitably cross their signals somewhat by the time they reach your ears, meaning that even a solid brick wall is likely to end up with some amplitude variance, particularly if you're not sitting directly between the speakers. (We told you this article was technical.) By contrast, loudness war'd albums have been known to induce headaches when played through good enough headphones; some sources have even alleged that they can contribute to hearing loss. It's a rather bizarre and unfortunate irony of the modern music industry that higher quality audio equipment will in many cases result in a less pleasant listening experience.)

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Ever since the dawn of humanity, it's been a known fact that people respond more easily to louder audio stimuli. Thus the illusion that "LOUDER = BETTER". With the advent of music recording technology, the music industry sought to capitalize on this; if our album is louder than their album, and the listeners don't adjust their volume dials to compensate (or can't, if they're hearing it in a bar, a gramophone with no volume dial, etc.), our album will sound better! However, vinyl records suffer from physical limitationsnote for example, too much bass can bump the needle out of place, and too much high end can destroy the printing needle when creating a record! that necessarily constrain the physical (and perceived) loudness of a record. The search for loudness became easier with the introduction of the compact disc in 1982; now working with a digital storage medium, sound engineers found themselves liberated from the former physical constraints on perceived loudness.

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Any recording medium has an absolute limit when it comes to amplitude, and compact discs are no exception. Once audio engineers managed to max out, the only solution to go even more Up to Eleven and out-loud those other CDs was to break out the dynamic range compression , which squashes every bit up to the same volume level, causing listener fatigue .note In addition to dynamic range compression, sound engineers can use overdrive distortion (or outright digital clipping) to further increase the average amplitude of a track. Another trick is to increase the "perceived loudness" of a track by emphasizing frequency ranges the human ear is more sensitive to (highs and high-mids) and de-emphasizing others (very low sub bass and sometimes mids). The often-used analogy here is that of attempting to read a text written entirely in capitals in a huge font. In movies, Orange/Blue Contrast has a similar effect; since the contrast is pleasing to the eye, producers will push at as far as possible, often over-saturating the film in these colours and squashing out more subtle colours entirely.

Compression is not inherently bad. In fact, it is an essential part of the sound engineer's toolkit, used to level out the inconsistent volume in a track.note This is practically guaranteed to happen when recording live material. Especially bass guitars. Furthermore, it can be used creatively to manipulate the sound of a single instrumentnote especially drums, where compression is often used to emphasize the body or tail of a strike or even a full mix, "gluing" the tracks together. However, if used ineptly, it can result in unpleasant changes like undesired pumping, outright distortion, or a more abstract loss of "life" or "impact".

It is important to distinguish between brickwall limiting , an extreme form of dynamic range compression that prevents the amplitude from exceeding a certain threshold, and digital clipping , which actually introduces digital distortion into the signal by removing the peaks and troughs from a waveform. Another important thing to note is that compressingnote namely, using ''data compression'' , an entirely different concept from dynamic range compression music to a lossy format like AAC or MP3 can introduce digital clipping through intersample peaks. This can introduce clipping to heavily brickwalled material that previously did not clip at all and (needless to say) makes already clipping material sound even worse. (MP3 is often considered to do a worse job compressing loud music than other lossy formats such as AAC and Ogg Vorbis do, which is one reason the format has a negative reputation among audiophiles.)

The absolute peak of loudness started slowly creeping up in 1995 when Owen Morris mastered Oasis' (What's the Story) Morning Glory? to -8 dB RMS. Since then the tendency has been to make records louder. The resulting loudness war is due to a variety of factors, such as commercial concerns, stupid executives, following the leader or listeners / musicians who are unaware of this phenomenon, can't tell the difference and don't care, actually LIKE how it sounds, or are taking advantage of it for artistic purposes, or (especially as of the 2010s) amateur production jobs from self-produced bedroom projects or small-time producers with no formal training.

One of the most egregious aspects of the industry's reliance on increasing loudness is that hundreds of albums that originally had good dynamic range are now being "digitally remastered" with almost completely brickwalled peak levels.note Not to mention terrible adjustments to frequency balance.

By contrast, one of the sadder aspects that Nick Southall highlighted was the belief that if you master the songs loud, they'll be played more on the radio. It doesn't work like that: Radio stations (as well as TV stations) have their own compressors and equalisers to squash everything up to the same volume, with the result that any CD will get hit with this a second time for broadcast and an already hyper-compressed CD will just sound like shit squared. The existence of technologies such as ReplayGain and iTunes Radio's Sound Check additionally means that the volume of pieces played on internet radio is now frequently normalised to the same level, meaning that the only effect loudness war stunts will have on material played through these sources is making it less punchy. Mastering engineer Bob Katz' comments on this have been widely reported and discussed, and some sources believe that this will lead to the less widespread use of the practice in future recordings. (Indeed, some studies have suggested that the trend has already waned, with the average loudness of commercial releases peaking in around 2005.)

This is the main reason why people say vinyl records are "higher quality" (besides personal taste reasons such as the crackle and hum of records). The inherent quality of CDs is far better than records, but since "records are for audiophiles", there is far less incentive for audio engineers to trade-off quality for loudness on records. Additionally, vinyl records have a smaller dynamic range, which actually serves to nullify the ability to pull off loudness war stunts, even though it seems counterintuitive that this would be the case. While it's commonly believed that it's impossible to press a low-dynamic-range master to vinyl, this isn't strictly true; however, the format's limitations are of average loudness (as contrasted with digital formats, whose limitations are of peak loudness), meaning that if you want to press a low-dynamic-range master to vinyl, you will need to lower the volume to do so. If you tried to press a DR3 recording with the same loudness as it would have on CD, it would usually just throw off the needle or make the record unplayable. Since loudness war stunts will have little to no effect on a vinyl record's average loudness, this reduces the incentive to pull off such stunts; a DR10 master would stand out over a DR3 one on vinyl even more than it would on other formats, meaning that the only incentive for labels to press loudness war masters to vinyl is simply being too lazy to master the album separately (which, unfortunately, still happens fairly often). The Irony in all this, of course, is that digital formats like the CD finally made it possible to make audio as quiet as you wanted without any analog hiss obscuring it, but with a lot of equipment out there accommodating the audio levels of the War, exploiting this quality will often make things simply too quiet to hear.

For further information, Imperfect Sound Forever is required reading. More information is available online , including these two videos that do a great job of providing abbreviated explanations. There's also a 20-page forum thread dedicated to poorly mastered albums for examples. See also this , to show things are more complicated than they seem. A website allows you to use offline software to measure the dynamic range of a CD, express it as a number and add it to its ever-growing database.

There are algorithms that can be used to repair clipped audio to a certain extent; none of them are perfect, but they will generally produce end results that sound, at least to most ears, better than the commercially released versions with clipping. More info on one of them is available here . (Note that the next page of the forum thread in this link contains rather disorganised information on Adobe Audition's declipper, which is much more sophisticated and produces much better-sounding results, but does not have the benefit of being free software. iZotope RX, also not free software, has an even more sophisticated algorithm, and is fairly straightforward to use; the forum thread linked here doesn't currently go into it, but iZotope's own manual provides all the basic information about how to use it.)

(Alternatively, a quick, cheap partial solution, using a program like Nero Wave Editor, is to simply reduce the bass using the graphic equalizer, since bass-boosting is usually part of the loudness enhancement process. If done properly the bass-reduced version will sound only marginally 'thinner' than the original while having more peak fluctuations; the "Normalize" function can also be used to adjust the volume of sections of the song, although care must be taken to avoid sudden jumps in volume between sections. Another potential quick solution is to run the song through a high pass filter, which mimics the effect of pressing an album to vinyl. A CD run through a high pass filter with the right settings will be virtually indistinguishable from a vinyl rip from a comparable-sounding master and will wind up with substantially higher dynamic range scores than the original recording. A third possible solution is to use a phase rotation filter - 90 degrees is, of course, the optimal amount [180 degrees would just invert the waveform, naturally]. Note that the clipping will still be present if any of these solutions are used; it will probably, however, be substantially less annoying and fatiguing to listen to.)

One potential way to find non-loud versions of songs is that video clips posted to video services like YouTube often avoid the loudness issue as they are mastered separately. In many cases, versions of albums that are specially mastered for iTunes (which are often advertised as being such) also have more dynamic range (although frequently you can only buy these in lossy versions, which carry their own problems; fortunately, the compression algorithm used to sell iTunes music in .m4a format is very, very good, to the point where the vast majority of people will be unable to tell the difference from a lossless sourcenote Specifically, the frequencies missing from iTunes files are almost exclusively above 20 kHz, which is beyond the normal range of human hearing, except for small children's and under certain laboratory conditions - and since the supersonic frequencies have to be louder than 100 dB to be perceptible, the missing frequencies won't be perceptible in everyday music listening). Failing that, people will Keep Circulating the Tapes of whichever version is the least clipped or even look for places to rip masters from (full-band Rhythm Games are one source) so they can try their hand at mixing themselves. Some (though not all) file-sharing websites also allow users to share fan-produced remixes/remasters of albums (if the unclipped stems aren't available, these are usually produced with one of the above methods, most commonly a declipper). This is not strictly legal, but it is another common source of fans circulating the metaphorical tapes, as many feel these remasters to be Better Than Canon.

A note about the measurements often used in this article and its subcategories: Two frequently used measurements of a record's loudness are its ReplayGain score and its TT Dynamic Range Meter score (written like "DR10" or "DR5"). A large negative ReplayGain score indicates a very loud record. This isn't necessarily a guarantee that the record will be heavily compressed (nor is a smaller negative score or a positive score a guarantee that there will be no compression), but most of the time it is correlated with this trope. The Dynamic Range Meter score measures the dynamic range of the recording more directly, though CD and vinyl scores sourced from the same master can vary (vinyl scores tend to be higher due to the nature of the format). Generally, the higher the Dynamic Range Meter score, the more dynamic a recording is, though that doesn't necessarily mean it'll be free from other artefacts of the war such as clipping. (A DR5 recording might have been compressed with an algorithm that doesn't lead to clipping, for example, while a DR9 recording may still have clipped peaks). The only foolproof way to determine whether a recording is clipped is to look at the zoomed-in peaks yourself (and it is worth noting that the clipped peaks of a vinyl or cassette that was sourced from a clipped master will appear diagonal rather than horizontal due to the nature of analogue playback; many listeners have also noted that the effect sounds less harsh on analogue formats for the same reason). A database of TT Dynamic Range Meter logs can be found here , though it is not complete (feel free to send in your own logs if you like; the plug-in is available for foobar2000 here ).

It may also be worth noting that, due to the general trend of increasing loudness of commercial releases over time, a release that would have qualified as an example of this trope in 1995 would not necessarily qualify as an example of this trope in 2005 or 2015 (unless it's by Oasis). Similarly, an album that would qualify as an aversion of this trope now would not have qualified as an aversion in 1995. An album that comes out to DR8 generally qualifies as good mastering by today's standards, but would not have been two decades ago. When looking at examples of this trope, it's probably worth noting that they're graded on a curve, so to speak.

Note that this is a separate issue from the loudess or intensity of music by genre; that's discussed under Mohs Scale of Rock and Metal Hardness. When loud music is used as a weapon, that's Loud of War. Not to be confused with Lodoss War. Note that this trope is not named for the band that did the soundtrack to Mazinkaiser SKL.

Examples

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Compression for stylistic reasons

Amusing casualties