“The Loudness War” Might Be Over
“The Loudness War” started in the 40’s. Record Producers noticed that the louder jukebox singles were received with much more delight so they asked the mastering engineers to turn the music up before the vinyl was printed. The physical limits of vinyl prevented it getting too loud but throughout the century, up until the CDs of the 80’s, singles remained fairly ‘hot’. CDs don’t have physical limits like the needle-in-the-valley of a record, or the magnetised oxide of tape. CDs are a digital format which means they contain, at their core, 0s and 1s; these are read in chunks, converted to numbers and then converted to sound. If those numbers add up to more than, let’s say, 1, the sound will distort and the gentle curve at the edge of a sound wave will be turned into a ‘hard clip’ (a square edge), and this is ugly to the ear.
The early years of CD sounded fantastic with lots of dynamic range, like real life! But throughout the 1990’s record producers again asked their mastering engineers to turn it up, which ended up with some of the loudest CDs in history including the famous Red Hot Chilli Peppers “Californication” from 1999.
Artists and engineers became frustrated with these expectations and often couldn’t override a label’s demand to “make it louder” so the dynamic expression in the artist’s product was lost in the final product.
Ultimately, back then, everyone had a volume knob they could adjust the playback volume of their CD/record/tape to their satisfaction.
In the last 20 years streaming platforms have taken off and the current data shows around 80% of music consumed in the UK is from streaming platforms. These platforms are companies, and they have created brands which need defining and maintaining. Part of those brands is ‘how loud is the music’, and while the consumers probably don’t care how loud it is, they do care how loud the tracks are when played next to each other. Music products across the genres have a huge variety of energetic build-ups at different frequencies and mix engineers aren’t making sure the levels of their clients new electro-shizzle album aren’t the same as Johnny Fluke’s banjolele duo from 1932. So while certain genres have similar target levels (these are called LUFS - Loudness Unit Full Scale and measured in dBFS) and mix/master engineers will certainly want their clients’ music to sound similar to other similar artists, the streaming platforms want a way to “make all the tracks the same volume for you”, in the same way a radio station ‘feels’. The difference is radio stations use crazy multi-band compression/limiting/harmonic excitement to create a sonic brand, where Spotify/iTunes/etc only turn the tracks up or down (except in extreme cases where they might limit the signal if they needed to turn it up so much that it ended up hard clipping, so limiters are employed prior to the potential clipping stage). To turn it up or down ‘the right amount’ they need to analyse things and have target levels. So all songs are analysed and given a LUFS value, then, when a song is played on the platform, the playback engine will turn the tracks up or down based on their target levels. For example, Spotify turns tracks up or down to reach a target LUFS of -14 dBFS. If a song has a LUFS of -9, it will be turned down by 5dB to make sure it doesn’t sound super loud against the track playing before and after. And of course the opposite is equally true.
You needed to understand all of that in order to understand that the Audio Engineering Society have agreed some new target levels for mix/mastering engineers to use as guidance for their releases. This Technical Document AESTD1008.1.21-8 covers the new recommendations producers/mix/mastering engineers should observe when doing their job.
From what I can make out, the recommendations seem to pull us back into more dynamics (previous streaming target LUFS for music was -14, and it is now-16 which means, among other things, more dynamic range) which leads back to the title, the loudness wars might be over. It is, admittedly, a bit click-baity, and it’s likely it won’t ever be over, we’ll just find better ways to keep the artists’ original expressive intent.
And if that isn’t what matters in the end, I’ve completely got the wrong end of stick..
EXTRA LINK FOR FUN
dr.loudness-war.info is a great database of the dynamic ranges (which isn’t quite the LUFS, but more a measure of the difference between the loudest and quietest bits in a track) of releases going back to the 1950’s.
Click here to see the tracks with the least dynamic range (and probably the highest LUFS). If you want to listen to these tracks without your streaming service adjusting the volume you’ll need to turn off Normalisation. I’ll turn this into a blog post of its own, but here are the most popular streaming apps and how to turn off normalisation.
Spotify: In account settings “Audio Quality -> Normalise Volume” and click it off
iTunes: Preferences -> Playback -> Sound Check and untick the check box.
Youtube: You cannot turn it off in youtube video
Youtube Music (premium?): There is no normalisation of music in Youtube Music
At least all the streaming platforms have agreed on something! /S
(they’ve agreed on nothing)