Loudness wars article

Posted by: dayjay on 07 January 2016

There is an interesting article on the BBC's website at the moment re the loudness wars. Not much that is new or unknown other than a conclusion that the move to streaming via services such as Spotify may finally end the loudness wars because those services equalise volumes across tracks anyway and the advantage of louder music is lost whilst the drop in quality remains. Not sure how valid that argument is but it would be a welcome fall out from streaming if true

Posted on: 07 January 2016 by Simon-in-Suffolk

There is an interesting article on the AES library where they have analysed mastering compression techniques and fashions over the years for popular commercial music and they concluded the peak of mastering compression was in the early to mid 2000s (from memory) but is now on the decline based on a rather large sample of recordings they analyzed..

Simon

Posted on: 07 January 2016 by dayjay

Yes, fits with the content of the BBC article too Simon, they showed a graph that, form memory, showed a year on year increase from 1985 but that showed it level out in the 2000 although not reduce. Interesting

Posted on: 07 January 2016 by joerand

Encouraging news I guess, although (as an example) Adele's latest CD is awfully compressed.