This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Working Title: Record Of Loudness War: From YKTTW
Sean Tucker; Whoever came up with the name of this article should be shot and fed to angry ferrets. That isn't an Incredibly Lame Pun, that's a physically painful pun.
Insanity Prelude: This is depressing. (Especially since I just bought one of the albums on the list, Black Holes and Revelations. .... I love "Map of the Problematique" anyway. :| )
J Chance: I too love some of the stuff mentioned, and wonder how much better it would sound without the brick wall...also, can't help mentally taking the title pun one step farther, to make "loudness-of-record war".
Twin Bird: Does anyone think this page seems a bit too much like a rant? Especially with the old disclaimer: "This is the one trope to which Tropes Are Not Bad and Your Mileage May Vary do not apply. Ever."
Radhreni: That old disclaimer was a bit much, but I can sympathize with whoever wrote it. I'm a musical instrument -> color synesthete, and most modern music, depending on mastering, is at best watered-down color through a thick fog, at worst drab, dreary gray with all the color bleached out. It's VERY unpleasant.
The Rhino remasters of Chicago's back catalogue taught me I have to be wary with modern remasters, too. Argh.
Wheezy: I work with Audition 1.5 every day at the radio station and in my home musical projects (I'm using it right now), and I squeed when I saw the image. Nice job, whoever added it.
BTW: This trope is a Berserk Button for anyone who works with pre-recorded music. I often have to "borrow" the station's studio to record samples for my side projects, because so many modern tracks sound like ass when ripped from a home CD drive. They're distorted as hell.
aswilson: Should aversions really be listed? The only way I could see that really making sense is a band that succumbed to overcompression and later saw the error of their ways.
- The Pocket: Well, for those of us who aren't audiophiles with very sensitive ears, and thus might not even have noticed that this is going on, it would help to have some examples of aversions made by popular artists so we could compare (both to hear how much quieter a "good" album sounds coming from the same device and to hear how much better it sounds).
- Twin Bird: @aswilson - You're thinking of a subversion. An "aversion" is the thing that we try to get people to stop calling a "subversion," i.e., where it simply isn't. We don't usually list aversions without a good reason, usually the reason being they're extremely rare (cf. No Bisexuals in the site's early years, although that was trimmed down because it wasn't really true anymore), but here, contrast does seem like a good reason, although what do I know?
The Pocket: I haven't heard any of the examples given here, and I'm not the kind who could probably tell this stuff, but I think I know what's being described. Would Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by any chance be an 'especially egregious example'? Because it does clearly sound like a lot of clipping happened during the recording process. Almost as if they recorded it by putting a mic up to the amp, and turning the amp all the way up. Given that this is Nirvana we're talking about, though, that was probably on purpose.
Wheezy: Ironically, I read a Rolling Stone article about this trope recently, and Smells Like Teen Spirit was provided as an example of an aversion. Supposedly, they did everything right in that song. So it goes to show this trope often isn't apparent until you can see a waveform of the song.
Sen: Page creator here. Sean Tucker: yes, horrible pun, but it wasn't mine. Somebody else suggested it and I ran with it. I'm thinking "Loudness of Record War" should work better. The Pocket: hell no, Smells Like Teen Spirit isn't an example. This video shows what it would actually sound like if it was released today: [1].
Hypocrisy doesn't have an album called warpath. The album Virus has a song called war-path, but I don't have it, so I think that's the song where the waveform comes from. I don't have the album, though, so I can't check it.
The Pocket again: I noticed the bit at the bottom about commercials, and realized television shows themselves must be victims of brickwalling too, because whenever I watch a DVD I have to turn my set's volume way way up. Of course, within the same movie I often have to mess with the volume control, because the music will be too loud one minute and a character's "indoor voice" will be completely inaudible the next. So... maybe the people mastering audio for television are catering to the limitations of the hardware more than anything else?
autofire: Is there any freeware software that can catch this phenomenon in action, like Audition can?
Sen: Well, any audio editor can catch this, pretty much. Audacity's the one I remember as being freeware...
