I got together for some drinks with a few friends who are engineers and producers , and inevitably the 'loudness wars' subject came up. How do we deal with the demands of 'it's not loud enough' from both labels and artists?
This isn't new; I remember mastering vinyl LPs years ago, and even then there was an effort from producers and artists to 'get it loud.' There was another issue then too; more bass = less program time per side, so the mastering engineer had to juggle how much low end could cut .v. running time. There were complaints about players 'jumping the tracks' on particularly loud, bass heavy, cuts.
Now, when the audience listens to the radio, they have becomed accustomed to that 'compressed' sound. To them, it sounds like the industry standard - that's what songs are supposed to sound like. It sounds like a 'hit.' That's what labels and artists want their releases to sound like, but now they want it in their car, at home and on their iPod. Listening to an album, in order, all the way through is a thing of the past: iPods and CD players are set to 'shuffle' internet stations are playing isolated tracks, and more and more the audience is creating playlists, combining disparate songs into a new, and unanticipated, replacement for the album.
You can fight this all you want, but if you make a living in this business, you'd better make your music also sound like their notion of a 'hit.'
What I'm doing now is mixing and mastering two distinct and very different versions. One for streaming, the net, radio promo releases and then an entirely different mix and master which is solely intended for the manufacturing of CDs. This, to me, is a happy compromise. Soon, though, with the prospect of few physical CDs actually being released, this tactic won't work, as the delivery medium will be mostly lossy digital files so most music will be subjected to this lowest denominator.
Examples:
These are the stats from a well-known rock release. The numbers to pay attention to are the Peak Amplitude, Minimum RMS power, Average RMS power, Maximum RMS power and the Clipped Samples. The Average RMS power is the stat. that is going to make your song sound louder, less loud or about the same as commercial releases with which you might be comparing your song. This sucker is LOUD, but there were more than a few disparaging remarks on the net about how bad it sounded - distortion, no dynamic range and generally fatiguing to listen to.
Here's a waveform screen shot of this release, at maximum zoom. Notice how many peaks of the waveform are essentially cut off. The peaks are flattened.
Here's a rock song that I recently mixed, and before it was mastered.
Click here to play an audio sample of a section of a song before mastering.
Typically, when I mix, I try to have my outputs peak at around -6 dB. This is to allow enough room for the mastering engineer do his stuff, and I did want it louder. But not to the point where the music suffered and had the life squashed out of it. Here's the corresponding stats. after it had been mastered.
Notice that the Average RMS value after mastering was 12dB louder. This (very roughly, not taking into account any weighting) means that my mastered version, on average, was apparently 4 times louder than my mix. Here's the waveform:
Click here to play the same section as the earlier mix sample, after mastering.
So how has this changed over the years of rock music? Here are the stats. from The Beatles "Back in the U.S.S.R" which wasn't intended to be a quiet song.
and the waveform:
More Reading:
2.19.09
Even More Reading:
I was browsing the S.O.S Mastering forum today, and came across some posts and links from John Scrip at Massive Mastering near Chicago. In his blog, I read some good articles here; kudos to John for his contributions to this debate.
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