Chronicles from The Loudness War Trenches

The loudness war is a process that started during the eighties and continued until today. Basically, music producers discovered that louder music sounded better, so they struggled to be louder than anyone else. This means that today's music (Timbaland, Black Eyed Peas) sound like shit, because it has no dynamics - it sounds all the same - very loud, all the time.



The good thing: the war is over. Or at least, that is what this interesting article claims.

Now a new target format - downloadable media combined with jukebox players - has gained acceptance. It hasn't eliminated the CD format, but a tipping point has been reached, and the CD's days are numbered. Mastering engineers are already marketing their services towards the new media. And over the coming decade, mastering engineers will adopt new practices and technologies to exploit the capabilities of this format.

And the Loudness War will end forever.

The question then will simply be - do we need to buy yet another copy of the White Album?

I'm quoting from another website, the audio hall of shame. Here are the albums with more measured clipping.

1 – Black Eyed Peas – Elephunk (54 clips/second)
2 – Wheatus – Wheatus (47 clips/second)
3 – Sheryl Crow – Cmon cmon (41 clips/second)
4 – Jennifer Lopez – JLO (36 clips/second)
5 – Madonna – True Blue Remastered ( 43 clips/second)
6 – Gorillaz – Gorillaz (25 clips/second)
7 – Shakira – Laundry Service (32 clips/second)
8 – Macy Gray – On how life is (26 clips/second)
9 – The Chemical Brothers – The Golden Path Single (31 clips/second)
10 – Eminem – The Marshall Mathers CD1 (26 clips/second)
11 – Turin Brakes – Ether Song Bonus Disc (14 clips/second)
12 – Eminem – The Marshall Mathers CD2 (26 clips/second)
13 – Nelly Furtado – Whoa Nelly Uk Special Edition (13 clips/second)
14 – Britney Spears – Baby One More Time (19 clips/second)
15 – Ozzy Osbourne – The Essential & Disc 1 (14 clips/second)
16 – Vitamin C – Last Nite Uk Cd Single (15 clips/second)
17 – Fun Lovin’ Criminals – 100 Colombian (18 clips/second)
18 – Garbage – Version 20 (13 clips/second)
19 – Elastica – Elastica (13 clips/second)
20 – Turin Brakes – Ether Song (6 clips/second)

And that explains why everyone wants to throw the cd player through the window everytime they hear "Let get it started".