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Sat, 27 Sep 2008
The Loudness Trap
'And when the Metallica fans complain, you know it's too loud: The sad
slide in audio recording standards (see the second item in "Quiet
programmers and loud music [blogs.siliconvalley.com]") has now reached
the point where it offends even the battered eardrums of Metallica fans
[online.wsj.com]. The band's new album, "Death Magnetic," is tops on the
charts, but the Wall Street Journal reports some listeners are recoiling
because it's just too darn loud, an egregious example of the escalating
volume wars in pop music. In the race to stand out on the radio and
portable players, artists and recording engineers are increasingly
pumping up the perceived loudness by severely compressing the music's
dynamic range -- the span from the softest softs to the loudest louds.
Unfortunately, as Matt Mayfield, a Minnesota electronic-music teacher
[www.youtube.com], explains in Zen-like terms, "When there's no quiet,
there can be no loud." The result, especially to trained ears, is a thin,
brittle aural assault, sapped of all subtlety. Similar complaints greeted
the latest releases from U2, Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney.
Even the engineers who are doing the dial-twiddling are not happy about
the trend. In response to a Metallica fan's e-mail complaining about the
loudness, Ted Jensen, the new album's mastering engineer, said, "Believe
me, I'm not proud to be associated with this one." Chris Athens, Jensen's
business partner, said he tries to rein in artists who want him to turn
it up to 11. "I've had lots of people -- I mean lots and lots of people
-- try and push a record to a place I thought it didn't belong," Athens
told the Journal. "We try to deliver something that mitigates the damage
the client wants. I drag my feet and give them something a little louder
and a little louder." Cliff Burnstein, Metallica's co-manager, says the
complainers are just overly finicky audiophiles. Across the band's entire
audience, he said, 98 percent of the response has been "overwhelmingly
positive." Unfortunately, between the prevalence of low-quality earbuds
and uncritical ears, that's probably true.
(GMSV)