LOUDNESS WARS – week five
Psychologically, when mixing, people tend to have a “louder is better” mentality, where when the volume is raised and we think that the mix is better, when this isn’t the case – this is referred to as The Loudness War or The Loudness Race.
The Loudness War started when in the 1960s and Jukeboxes became popular, where louder records tended to stand out from the rest. The Beatles noticed this and decided to order a Fairchild compressor limiter into Abbey Road Studios to compete with Motown records that were louder, which reduced the dynamic range. With the development of DAW audio plugins, it encourages producers to contribute to this loudness war since there are so many possibilities of making certain sounds louder, having control over the dynamics.
We can see that music over the past few decades have appeared to be louder, which is primarily due to compression.
An example of a published album with lots of compression and limiters used is shown in (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? by Oasis with the intend of creating something ‘absurdly loud’.
Though, it is said by Bob Ludwig, a record mastering engineer, that the "Loudness War” came about because of Metallica’s album Death Magnetic since it was released on the game Guitar Hero differently as it was released on CD, so people were able to hear the tracks with and without compression. Following this, 10,000 or more fans signed a petition for the band to remix the album because of the loudness of it.
NPR (2009). The Loudness Wars: Why Music Sounds Worse. [online] NPR.org. Available at: [https://www.npr.org/2009/12/31/122114058/the-loudness-wars-why-music-sounds-worse.]
Wykes, A. (2021). What’s the loudness war? [online] SoundGuys. Available at: [https://www.soundguys.com/the-loudness-war-51513/.]