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They Really Don't Make Music Like They Used To
Opinion
They Really Don’t Make Music Like They Used To
If the Eagles or Marvin Gaye fan in your life is complaining about this year’s Grammy songs, this might be why.
By Greg Milner
Mr. Milner writes about music and technology.
Feb. 7, 2019
It’s Grammy time, and as always, watching the awards ceremony on Sunday will include a subtext of cross-generational carping: “They don’t make music the way they used to,” the boomers and Gen Xers will mutter. And they’ll be right. Music today, at least most of it, is fundamentally different from what it was in the days of yore — the 1970s and 80s.
Last year, the industry celebrated a sales milestone. The Recording Industry Association of America certified that the Eagles’ “Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975),” was the best-selling album of all time, with sales of 38 million. (The formula took account of vinyl, CD and streaming purchases. Purists will have to put aside the fact that a greatest hits collection is not really an LP album as most of us know it.) ... It was a full-circle moment — the album, released almost exactly 43 years ago, was the first to be awarded platinum status (sales of one million), an evocative reminder that songs were once commodities so valuable that millions of people would even buy them in repackaged form. It was also a taken as a quiet victory for people who believe that music today is too loud.
By “too loud,” I don’t mean you can’t crank the Eagles, if that’s your thing. I’m talking about loudness as a measure of sound within a particular recording. Our ears perceive loudness in an environment by reflexively noting the dynamic range — the difference between the softest and loudest sounds (in this case, the environment is the recording itself, not the room you are playing it in). A blaring television commercial may make us turn down the volume of our sets, but its sonic peaks are no higher than the regular programming preceding it. The commercial just hits those peaks more often. A radio station playing classical music may be broadcasting a signal with the same maximum strength as one playing hip-hop, but the classical station broadcast will hit that peak perhaps once every few minutes, while the hip-hop station’s signal may peak several times per second.
A loud environment in this sense is one with a limited dynamic range — highs that peak very high, and lows that aren’t much lower. For decades, musicians and engineers have employed dynamic range compression to make recordings sound fuller. Compression boosts the quieter parts and tamps down louder ones to create a narrower range. Historically, compression was usually applied during the mastering stage, the final steps through which a finished recording becomes a commercial release.
A Scene From the ‘Loudness War’
The compression of dynamic range — the gap between the loud and quiet moments — of popular music has been used in recording studios for decades. The more aggressive use of compression in recent years is illustrated by these two song samples. In “This Is America,” the peak levels are clipped and the average loudness is less varied than in “What’s Going On.” The distance between the peaks and the average, a measure of how much the song’s range has been squeezed, is six decibels greater in Marvin Gaye’s song than it is in Childish Gambino’s track. More examples are at the bottom of this article.
{Snip the charts, to which I cannot link. They are well worth your look.}
....
The war never really ended, but it has evolved. Streaming services like Spotify now “normalize” the music’s output, so that we aren’t always adjusting our volume settings. This should lessen the incentive for mastering engineers to abuse compression. But according to Bob Ludwig, one of the industry’s pre-eminent mastering engineers (and a winner of Grammys for Best Engineered Album for artists like Alabama Shakes, Beck and Daft Punk), this hasn’t stopped mixing engineers from ladling on the loudness, reducing the dynamic range of the music even as the streaming normalization defeats their purpose. “The loudness war is worse than ever,” he recently told me. “It is a super-discouraging situation.”
....
Greg Milner is the author of “Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music” and “Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds.”
They Really Don’t Make Music Like They Used To
If the Eagles or Marvin Gaye fan in your life is complaining about this year’s Grammy songs, this might be why.
By Greg Milner
Mr. Milner writes about music and technology.
Feb. 7, 2019
It’s Grammy time, and as always, watching the awards ceremony on Sunday will include a subtext of cross-generational carping: “They don’t make music the way they used to,” the boomers and Gen Xers will mutter. And they’ll be right. Music today, at least most of it, is fundamentally different from what it was in the days of yore — the 1970s and 80s.
Last year, the industry celebrated a sales milestone. The Recording Industry Association of America certified that the Eagles’ “Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975),” was the best-selling album of all time, with sales of 38 million. (The formula took account of vinyl, CD and streaming purchases. Purists will have to put aside the fact that a greatest hits collection is not really an LP album as most of us know it.) ... It was a full-circle moment — the album, released almost exactly 43 years ago, was the first to be awarded platinum status (sales of one million), an evocative reminder that songs were once commodities so valuable that millions of people would even buy them in repackaged form. It was also a taken as a quiet victory for people who believe that music today is too loud.
By “too loud,” I don’t mean you can’t crank the Eagles, if that’s your thing. I’m talking about loudness as a measure of sound within a particular recording. Our ears perceive loudness in an environment by reflexively noting the dynamic range — the difference between the softest and loudest sounds (in this case, the environment is the recording itself, not the room you are playing it in). A blaring television commercial may make us turn down the volume of our sets, but its sonic peaks are no higher than the regular programming preceding it. The commercial just hits those peaks more often. A radio station playing classical music may be broadcasting a signal with the same maximum strength as one playing hip-hop, but the classical station broadcast will hit that peak perhaps once every few minutes, while the hip-hop station’s signal may peak several times per second.
A loud environment in this sense is one with a limited dynamic range — highs that peak very high, and lows that aren’t much lower. For decades, musicians and engineers have employed dynamic range compression to make recordings sound fuller. Compression boosts the quieter parts and tamps down louder ones to create a narrower range. Historically, compression was usually applied during the mastering stage, the final steps through which a finished recording becomes a commercial release.
A Scene From the ‘Loudness War’
The compression of dynamic range — the gap between the loud and quiet moments — of popular music has been used in recording studios for decades. The more aggressive use of compression in recent years is illustrated by these two song samples. In “This Is America,” the peak levels are clipped and the average loudness is less varied than in “What’s Going On.” The distance between the peaks and the average, a measure of how much the song’s range has been squeezed, is six decibels greater in Marvin Gaye’s song than it is in Childish Gambino’s track. More examples are at the bottom of this article.
{Snip the charts, to which I cannot link. They are well worth your look.}
....
The war never really ended, but it has evolved. Streaming services like Spotify now “normalize” the music’s output, so that we aren’t always adjusting our volume settings. This should lessen the incentive for mastering engineers to abuse compression. But according to Bob Ludwig, one of the industry’s pre-eminent mastering engineers (and a winner of Grammys for Best Engineered Album for artists like Alabama Shakes, Beck and Daft Punk), this hasn’t stopped mixing engineers from ladling on the loudness, reducing the dynamic range of the music even as the streaming normalization defeats their purpose. “The loudness war is worse than ever,” he recently told me. “It is a super-discouraging situation.”
....
Greg Milner is the author of “Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music” and “Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds.”
I have several albums mastered by Bob Ludwig. They stand out.
The comments are great. Oldtimers weigh in with the remembrances of the greatness of vinyl.
An example:
Bruce Rozenblit Times Pick
Kansas City, MO | Feb. 7
I'm an audio engineer. I don't make recordings, I make equipment. I can't listen to digital anymore, only vinyl. I have an original Rolling Stones album and the CD of it. The vinyl sounds like there is real band playing in my house and the digital sounds like it came out of a machine, which it did.
The recording industry has killed fidelity and replaced it with pumped up noise. It's horrible. People don't know what real music sounds like. Even in live venues, they compress it and pump it up and them play through horrible sounding class D amplifiers.
This excellent article provides graphical evidence of what many of us have known for years. The record companies are butchering music. They have taken the soul out of it. They have removed the need for a true high fidelity system which can reveal that emotional connection with the artist.
I have Johnny Cash's The Man Comes Around. It's glorious. Cash was involved with the mastering. He was old school and knew how to master. The new guys don't have a clue and the old timers are dying out.
The music industry is doing to music what fast food did to cuisine. It's the lowest common denominator and it's all the same homogenize mediocrity. They sell canned noise instead of artistic creativity.
When my generation dies out, that will be the end of high quality music reproduction and the artistry it allows. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. The public has no idea of what they are missing.
Bruce Rosenblitz:
Transcendent Sound Vacuum Tube Audio Amp Kits
1 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
