Loudness War

While I know this is a audiophile site, I do want to speak out that you, as a consumer segment, have very little economic pull left in the market place. With the record labels in a death spin, and consumer electronics flat to declining, many content providers are faced with the prospect that the only end device that matters is the cell phone and iPod-like player. In China alone, there are over 780 million phones that could be music enabled, with another 100 million each in Japan and Korea. Music is now the number one feature set in India (WSJ did an extensive article on this two weeks ago). Compression allows music to sound good in this environment at the expense of your environment. As much as I am in favor of uncompressed music, the fact remains that you have little "pull" or "say" in the next frontier of music. In total, only 2 million "new" vinyl records were shipped last year. Digital downloading represents the only true channel remaining. Sorry ladies and gents, but the loudness war is over and you are on the losing side.

"but the loudness war is over and you are on the losing side"

PRobably true in the overall big picture.

However high end audio has always been a niche market and there will always be people who enjoy good sound and are willing to focus time and energy achieving it.

The glass will hope remain part full for a long time, so look at the bright side and just enjoy all the good music and decent recordings out there.

Still, a bit is a terrible thing to waste!!!!

Interesting that more recent remasters of most Genesis score lower than earlier versions from the 1990s.

I have both versions of Foxtrot and have never compared. I need to rip those to the music server and see whats going on there......

Mapman says;
'By the way, a lot of newer "loud" recorded CDs will cream lesser audio systems not capable of delivering the goods to an audiophile's ears. In some cases, I believe the shortcoming is in the audio systems ability to deliver the "loud" dynamics present without distortion, not an inherent shortcoming with the recording itself.'

The only correction/alteration I would give is to substitute 'In some cases' to 'In ALL cases'.

TRUE.
If your speakers are up to scratch then everything will sound at a minimum musical and enjoyable.
I was of the opinion many years ago that the cd was the issue, now I have seen the light and view the opposite to be true, after I visited a well respected hi-fi reviewer in the UK and heard his gear. Hearing WAS believing, nothing played sounded bad.

Gawdbless and Mapman,

It is not the dynamics on the "loud" CD that is the problem. It is the complete lack of dynamics. In order to remove the dynamics of natural sounds it requires heavy manipulation to flatten the waveforms. As you flatten a waveform it eventually loses the sinusoidal shape and becomes square. A square waveform representation of an original smooth sinusoid is made up of many odd harmonics - all of which is distortion.

If you have a system that is forgiving (unable to handle transients and reproduce the square waveform accurately) then it will indeed improve the sound as this will reduce some of the higher odd harmonics. Another trick is to have a recessed midrange as the midrange is where our hearing is very sensitive - a laid back midrange will also improve the sound of distorted "loud" CD's.

On the flip side - if you play the Sheffield Labs Drum track CD (oodles of dynamic range) or any of the higher quality jazz, classical and much of the 80's pop/rock recordings then it will sound most realistic on an accurate system that is not forgiving.

The points you make are quite valid though and pose a dilemma. Do you need two systems - one for the loudness war CD's and one for the audiophile (jazz and classical) CD's or do you try to find something in between (a compromise). Another solution is to go to Vinyl - as the physical analog medium of Vinyl (or analog tape) simply cannot produce a square wave as ruthlessly as digital can - so "loudness wars" are inherently less of a problem on Vinyl.

I own "revival" by Fogerty. It is a good album, very clear,detailed sounding. However, compression was defintely used as it is recorded pretty loud. Not as loud as some though. Compression is raising the volume of softer parts of songs to the same or close to the same volume as the loudest parts. The lack of "dynamic" change in volume between the soft and loud parts is what is termed lack of dynamics. Music heard live has these dynamic changes and it's absence is unnatural. The fact that a recording sounds loud usually means a lack of natural dynamic change. Reading this thread there seemed to be some confusion, if not, sorry.