Loudness War and Peace 

2024 ❤ Bob Katz

Thanks, Bob, for drawing on your many years of experience to share your perspectives on this. Thinking of you has stayed my hand many times when I was ready to reach for that peak limiter!

The most dynamic CD that I have, Speaking In Tongues by Talking Heads (the version featuring the LP edits), looks to have been mastered very early on in the CD format's existence, in 1983. It has a dynamic range score of 17, and sounds excellent provided that you turn your volume all the way up. In general the average 1980s CD in my experience has a DR score of about 12 or 13, while a typical mid-late 1990s CD has a score of around 8 or 9 and a lot of recordings from the mid 2000s to present score just 5 or 6. This means that many 1980s CDs are more than twice as dynamic as digital releases from the past decade. I find it pretty weird how a lot of nearly 40 year old digital releases sound better than modern ones (and the majority of remasters) considering how much digital technology has improved between then and now. I tend to search eBay and charity shops for used 1980s CDs (or unremastered reissues) because in the majority of cases I prefer the way they sound to the modern remasters that tend to be on streaming platforms. If you like to have your music in the FLAC format, a quieter, more dynamic recording will also compress better as well as sounding better. I've done an analysis of more than 1000 CDs mastered over the past 40 years using a spreadsheet. Those that were mastered in 1982 to 1984 tend to on average be quieter than those mastered between 1985 and 1990 since a lot of the earliest CDs did not make use of peak normalisation, however it was only from about 1991 where we began to see a noticeable decrease in the dynamics of pop/rock releases. I would have said that American releases began to become less dynamic from the end of the 1980s while the trend only became commonplace on British and European releases from about 1992.

wow, even the First Master sounds terrible

Its 2024 now and mastering stills beign the same. But... engineers now are more experienced to use all these destructive processes in order to get a good balance between loudness and quality

Super interesting video. I found your name recommended by someone in a gearspace forum. I wondered what youre thoughts were about a daw like reaper operating at 64bit but using plugins like Waves operating at 32 bit, Ive recorded at 32bit fp. Ive read that there is either some sort of dithering happening within the daw or the plugin itself. Ive read elsewhere of course dither doesnt matter at such a high bit depths. With a little of my own experimentation I could swear I hear a subtle pleasing difference adding reapers dithering plugin before my waves plugins on on a 40 track recording and also before sending out any outboard gear with my rme 24bit converters for outboard processing. The difference is subtle but it seemed to take away a harshness Ive been battling for a couple of years. Is there anyway you could clear me up on this. Can quantization errors happen between the internal processing between different plugins operating at different bit depths and would possibly be resolved through dither. Also should dither be used when sending to outboard gear and back in. 100 articles have told me its not necessary due to the noisefloor yet I can hear a difference though its possible Im fooling myself. Thank you for any response.

An optimistic ending, I hope you’re right. Of course those that want to justify excess loudness will then claim their hot master does better on the radio (it doesn’t), or that it’s “their sound”. Your point about ability of moderate program to co-exist with the crushed, is I guess, the ultimate outcome we can all agree on.

Hey Bob! It’s 2020, have we arrived? /me thinks - not yet.

My goodness, this "super loud" master is still insanely dynamic compared to what I see in the EDM space, were by looking at the waverform I often can't really tell anything at all. I master my albums to around - 14 LUFS integrated, which is probably as quiet as anyone in the modern electronic dance music scene would ever go with. I am happy we've got the loudness normalisation implemented already in nearly all streaming platforms, including RU-vid, but the artists and engineers didn't really catch up to that, after getting used to smashing everything to death for decades on end to stay "competitive".

There is a difference between the loudness war and Dynamic Range. And Surprisingly, As loudness war is coming to an end dynamic range is suffering a lot. Naive producers are turning soft parts into loud to meet the -13dB LUFS on overall production. Musical Dynamics from Piano to Forte are not able to survive anymore. Hope someone will look upon the matter. Though I completely agree with BOB.

i can hear the improvement when i listened to music with spotify

Very interesting! So we are in 2020 now - how has your prediction panned out?? I'd love to hear that it's gotten better...

Thank you very much for this video, it was really instructive !! Best wishes !

Fascinating and well presented

very good video . its a tough challenge ,because sounds is psychological. play a loud track and it sounds good play a previous good track yet the lower output volume makes the track less interesting ,compared to the new loud track ,. i hope it does return to its previous state and the music restores itself but the way the industry is going i doubt it. lets remember rock is always louder than other genres however rock will share realistic instrumentation with natural good sounding volume while other styles of music are synthetic and a few share and use the distorted loud ouptut to distinguish themselves from other music . ITs all in accordance to its fundamental style and sciene . I do agree that music should be tamed correctly and not abused . The industry especially the radio are to blame andalso huge music sales add to this ... Great video and pinpointed just right .... good stuff here.

Sadly we are now in 2020, and it does NOT feel like 1980's level of music as mentioned in the end of this video. Apple currently has its rules to -14 LUFS, Spotify at -16 LUFS, youtube music at -14 LUFS. but people still are mastering at much much much higher levels, ignoring the rules. You can actually experience this within the premium version of Spotify that allows users to (switch off the limiter) set within spotify servers. And you will notice that the levels far exceeds their -16 LUFS rule... And most of it is coming from Top-40 music producers, Hip-Hop and EDM. No one is respecting the LUFS rules in the studio today in 2021 & beyond, because they consider it to be too low in volume compared to other songs on the market, so they revert back to the loudness wars. I have 45 years experience in the music industry and have seen things change as decades passed. And let me tell you, Its getting worse. The other sad part of 2020 and beyond is that now every joe, dick and harry has a studio in their homes. And everyone is calling themselves mastering engineers. I even had a 22 year old kid walk up to me in a convention telling me he was a mastering engineer. barely popped out of his mothers body, still wet behind the ears just barely graduating high school and going around calling himself a professional mastering engineer. Thats because again, every Joe, Dick and Harry now has a recording studio and there are no longer any REAL gate keepers for mastering like there was in the 80's. Such as mastering engineer Don Grossinger. One of the most famous mastering engineers in the east coast with well over 40+ grammy's won. These days, everyone is a mastering engineer, and they are ALL ignoring the LUFS rules set in the industry. I really miss the 80's when mastering engineers boldly said to people "NO I AM NOT MASTERING THIS BECAUSE ITS NOT MIXED PROPERLY". And record labels depended on those mastering engineers to gate-keep the music in the music industry. Now, everyone is running around like chickens with their heads cut off ignoring every rule set in the industry, because there are no longer any gate keepers in the industry. It was all taken away the very minute people were able to own studio equipment in their homes. Instead of paying $100 to $250 an hour in a professional studio. I am ALL for home studios... its great, but what I dont like is that now everyone is a mastering engineer and there are no real gate-keepers like the 80's. In the 80's you could NOT release a record without the approval of a mastering engineer that kept the industry rules intact, in regards to proper mix & mastering levels. And its getting worse kids, its getting worse.... we will see what happens in 2030 and 2040.......

Well... It's almost 2020... Are we improving yet?

Amazing, it's like a dream come true!

The funny thing in the audio example is the chopped up and totally edited bridge section, it's hard to count the beats because the whole groove stumbles. I mean, it's obvious that the client will go for artificial loudness when he/she can't hear the messy rhythm. Great video btw!

I am curious if the loudness wars will ever end in the aggressive bass music scene, it's been at the point where loudness standards have taken away from the quality tons of stuff, even stuff that's supposed to sound heavily distorted by choice for years. I think the issue with this comes down to live mix engineers not being consistently great across the club scene. I often find in these kinds of live show experiences the levels are not adjusted for artists that generally play louder or quieter songs. Am I wrong that this is something the live mix engineers should be controlling for?

I remember downloading a very old dark side of the moon Japanese CD and supposed to be the first CD pressing of that album ever. It was not playable on a car CD player lol. No loud enough. However on a good pair of headphones it was perfect and the best I've ever heard of that recording

Finally, a history lesson that i'm interested in! 😆😆 thank's Bob, i really enjoyed it!

ayee audio engineering ii gang

Would you say this happened?? Are we back in 1980?