Thursday
Apr162009
Dynamic range in music is dead
Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 11:16AM
If you do some searching online, you'll find blogs & articles by pro audio engineers and audiophiles expressing their frustration over the lack of dynamic range in music today. This has also been referred to as the loudness war. So what is dynamic range anyway? In basic terms, it's the different between the softest and loudest parts of an audio recording.
It used to be music was recorded to recreate the excitement of the live performance. That is to say, it had a "wide" dynamic range. Want to hear it loud? Turn up your stereo. You can test this by putting your stereo on a low volume, and comparing a modern rock recording vs a Beatles album (don't use something that has since been remastered). Pretty big difference.
Around the mid 80's was when things began to change, probably due in part to the competition between radio stations, and bands trying to 'sound the loudest'. Fast forward to 2009 and almost every modern song you hear has close to zero dynamic range. The purists are furious about this because of what is lost in making music artificially loud. Does anyone really care though? For the most part, not so much.
So what's happened is over the course of the last 25 years or so, we've been trained to equate "loud" with "good". And since the average person doesn't know anything about dynamic range, we've collectively gone with whatever radio, MTV & iTunes tells us is cool.
While it's pretty clear that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to keep making albums louder and louder, it's also unlikely that we will go back to doing things the way they were 25 years ago. Like it or not, dynamic range may be gone for good.
It used to be music was recorded to recreate the excitement of the live performance. That is to say, it had a "wide" dynamic range. Want to hear it loud? Turn up your stereo. You can test this by putting your stereo on a low volume, and comparing a modern rock recording vs a Beatles album (don't use something that has since been remastered). Pretty big difference.
Around the mid 80's was when things began to change, probably due in part to the competition between radio stations, and bands trying to 'sound the loudest'. Fast forward to 2009 and almost every modern song you hear has close to zero dynamic range. The purists are furious about this because of what is lost in making music artificially loud. Does anyone really care though? For the most part, not so much.
So what's happened is over the course of the last 25 years or so, we've been trained to equate "loud" with "good". And since the average person doesn't know anything about dynamic range, we've collectively gone with whatever radio, MTV & iTunes tells us is cool.
While it's pretty clear that it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to keep making albums louder and louder, it's also unlikely that we will go back to doing things the way they were 25 years ago. Like it or not, dynamic range may be gone for good.
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