What to do about this bad name: Take 2.: Record Of Loudness War

A long time ago, someone brought up an issue with Record of Loudness War, suggesting a rename because the title itself is nothing more than an Incredibly Lame Pun on Record Of Lodoss War. The name does absolutely nothing to actually describe what the trope is about, and yet...

Main/RecordOfLoudnessWar found in: 109 articles, excluding discussions.

This title has brought 3,281 people to the wiki from non-search engine links since 20th FEB '09.

Ok, somehow the trope is doing well for some reason...

For those of you who don't know what this trope is, it's the act of intentionally making the music louder on the album. The problem this presents is that there actually is a technical ceiling for how loud a song can be. The louder it is though, the less likely you're going to hear the individual instruments in the song. They don't stand out apart from other parts of the track. Anyone can turn up the volume on the radio to make it louder, but this does it to the song.

I was looking at another trope the other day and found a word that was used to describe the trope: Brickwalling. Doing a search through the trope itself, this word is used numerous times in the examples, and searching for "Brickwalling" only leads to pages where this trope is being talked about.

I think a rename such as Musical Brickwalling would be a good suggestion to get away from the pun. It would tell tropers who look at the name that it involves music, and that "Brickwalling" is something they might want to learn more about.

edited 8th Sep '11 4:46:29 PM by DRCEQ

A) I'm not sure it's a trope; it might be trivia. B) Wikipedia calls it Loudness war.

So what you're saying is "I'm re-proposing a rename of a trope that was proposed once and failed, because the name is a pun and I think it should be changed to this other word (that I'm not even going to explain) even though the current name appears to be working just fine?"

By the way, the thread for the previous rename 'is here.

edited 8th Sep '11 4:53:58 PM by Madrugada

Funny, I searched for a previous thread and found nothing.

I like the current name, but I'd be alright with just Loudness War if it comes down to a rename since that's the accepted laymen's name for the phenomenon.

The previous vote was too recent for me to feel comfortable advocating another at this point — at least not on the same topic (rename). I might be willing to discuss the namespace. There are zero in-universe examples, which leads me to suspect that this is not a trope.

Not A Trope. Also quite a bit of complaining the article, about Vlado Meller, needs to be cut out.

The crowner failed, but no one really presented an argument for why the pun in the name should be kept, and it is a pun only for the sake of the pun, no connection to the trope. I think this might be a valid case for appeal for admin veto, especially if it's just called Loudness War.

But we don't change names without a good reason to do so. The default is "Keep the current name unless persuasive arguments are offered as to why it should be changed", not "Change the name unless persuasive arguments are offered as to why it should be kept."

Reason: Because if a trope has a pre-existing term for it, we prefer to use that term?

I half suspect that the high usage count is because the current title actually contains Loudness War, not on any actual virtue.

edited 9th Sep '11 2:51:02 PM by Elle

The fact that the current title contains "Loudness War" is a virtue. The real question is whether the extra words make the title better or worse than just "Loudness War"; and if they make it worse, whether they make it enough worse to justify the work of changing the title.

They're a pun. Of course they make it worse.

Actually, I don't see any urgent need to rename this one, though plain old Loudness War should be a redirect.

This page is very verbose and hard to understand, I must say. I never understood what it meant before now, because the OP finally brought it down to understandable levels.

Also calling it trivia...

Besides that, we might consider opening an IP thread for it too, since the picture relies entirely on the caption to make any sense...

People keep thinking "Record of Loudness War" is a good, even a hilarious, name, for some reason. We tried to change the name, and failed, because of this.

Once again, I support a name change (redirect swap?) to Loudness War.

It is a pun but one that also works in its favor a bit (unlike Innocence Virgin On Stupidity which has lots of issues) "record" is conductive to music and Loudness War is the technique used.

There was no confusion with Record Of Lodoss War in the wick check iirc. Floating no since renaming for the hell of it is bad find a tangible problem though and all for it... Convince me (Misuse, Disuse, the standard wick stuff yada.)

Edit: wow "This title has brought 3,285 people to the wiki"

And Trivia umm not sure on that.

edited 10th Sep '11 9:10:23 AM by Raso

I disagree with this being trivia. Mastering volume is a production technique which has a direct effect on the work itself. An album that's mastered very loud will sound different from one that's mastered quietly—if you listen to both albums back to back, adjusting the volume knob so max loudness is the same between the two records, then the louder-mastered album will have less range between the highest and lowest volumes. It will be more homogeneously loud.

I saw this title a year ago and thought "wow, thats not gonna last long". Apparently its still going.

This is a godawful name for a trope, but since a rename crowner was done already and its still here, it's clear nothing will be done about it.

For what it's worth, I agree with the OP.

I think the name is ridiculous. Especially since it's forcing a pun on a pre-existing term. Trivia is probably debatable, though.

Should we get a crowner?

I think the current name is...okay. I don't think there's any reason for it to be a pun when plain old Loudness War would be a perfectly acceptable alternative, but I don't think the pun takes a whole lot out either.

We already had a crowner and rename lost. The only reason this thread is still open is because some people are trying special pleading in the hopes admins will override the earlier decision.

Personally, I see no compelling reason to change here. It's not confusing or misleading, there's no misuse, it clearly includes the common name. I don't find it particularly amusing, but neither does it bother me. The only thing I might want is a redirect at Loudness War, which we already have.

We can still get some good redirects. The current one is just Loudness War, which isn't much better. Is Louder Is Better taken?

No it is not. Would that work?

edited 11th Sep '11 12:35:40 PM by Discar

Louder Is Better sounds like a variant of Large Ham to me. This is only used on musical works, but even in a musical context, Louder Is Better sounds like something that might involve live rock music, rather than a technical issue with recordings.

Honestly, I don't think this is a general enough trope (assuming it is a trope, which I won't debate now) to need a lot more than the standard industry term attached. It's a minor technical detail for the most part, and hardly seems worth the time we've spent on it so far. If you can find another technical term for it, though, I'd probably go along with adding that. Otherwise, I think we should call this done for now.

Can we talk about some of the examples? A lot of YMMV material here. I think we are seeing a lot of people in the Steve Albini camp just running around saying that anything with significant compression is inherently bad without taking into account aesthetics and all that. While some egregious examples do exist (Oasis and remasters stand out), I think several examples are simply coming from people who either:

• Don't like things being loud

• Have a very specific taste towards music, and see compression as a threat to that.

• Don't know how to turn down the volume on their headphones or speakers

I think this definitely needs to be addressed.

As to the last one, when you have, say, 5 cd that you're listening to on shuffle, either on speakers or in your ipod device, and two of them are engaged in a Loudness War, then you have to constantly adjust that knob. It is distracting.