The Loudness Wars

Music quality suffered serious casualties in the nineties and aughts in what are colloquially known as "The Loudness Wars.” Album mastering favored compression and boosting the volume at the expense of dynamic range—an attribute that can increase enjoyment of music and decrease listener fatigue.

With the advent of the compact disc (CD), music is encoded to a digital format with a clearly defined maximum peak amplitude. Once the maximum amplitude of a CD is reached, loudness can be increased still further through signal processing techniques such as dynamic range compression and equalization. Engineers can apply an increasingly high ratio of compression to a recording until it peaks more frequently at the maximum amplitude, a technique colloquially known as brickwalling. In extreme cases, efforts to increase loudness can result in clipping and other audible distortion.2 Modern recordings that use extreme dynamic range compression and other measures to increase loudness therefore can sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as “victims of the loudness war”.

Thankfully, there seems to be broad recognition that this trend degraded the listening experience, and there has been pushback against the technique. Awareness of which recordings have increased compression and reduced dynamic range can help listeners distinguish the preferable versions. The Dynamic Range DB catalogs thousands of albums and their dynamic range across releases and formats. Frequently, you’ll notice that remasters done within a certain time period employ greater compression.

The ultimate judge, though, is your own ears. I recently ordered the Dirty Deluxe Edition CD from Sonic Youth after a period of it being out of print. Dirty is one of my favorite albums from the nineties, hands down. Before it arrived, I found out about the Dynamic Range DB and looked up the release to compare it with the CD I’ve had for decades. The results weren’t promising for my new acquisition.

Dirty (Original 1992 CD Release)
Min DR: 09
Max DR: 11

Dirty (Deluxe Edition Remastered 2003 CD Release)
Min DR: 05
Max DR: 09

I believe 05 is the lowest dynamic range score possible with a CD. I started to wonder if it made sense to have purchased the deluxe edition in the first place. Of course, I still threw the disc in my CD player almost the minute the package arrived on my doorstep. To my pleasant surprise, the CD sounded fantastic. I’m not at all disappointed. The DAC I have, the Schiit Bifrost, excels in separation—which compression hinders—and it didn’t have trouble with this disc. I haven’t done extensive listening comparisons with the original compact disc, but I’m not hearing lower sound quality.

This seems to be one of those I may not know art, but I know what I like situations.