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[David_Dovey]

Because of talk in This thread.

Pretty much. Worth noting (and perhaps this could be another thread) that the 'loudness wars' aren't entirely these dudes fault, mastering engineers also get a fair bit of pressure from Label Execs and band members and what not.

Oh yeah absolutely. I'm studying to become a recording engineering and I was thinking about trying to do further study to end up in a mastering studio, because I'd be totally the best and so tasteful and would never master all the dynamics out of albums blah blah blah, but after about a minute's worth of pursuing that train of thought I figured out that is what all the current mastering engineers probably thought when they got into the field themselves. I'm sure most mastering engineers with a modicum of taste or sense wouldn't agree with loudness-based mastering any more than any other music appreciator, especially considering those engineers who do go into mastering have to have pretty well-tuned ears (even moreso than the average engineer) as a requirement of the job.

Relevant articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_wars
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/imperfect-sound-forever.htm

[Caspian]

Dave: don't you live in perth as well? Are you studying at SAE, perchance? I just finished a degree there ^______^

To be honest, while I enjoy dynamics in my music I certainly don't mind a bit of clipping here and there, but I guess it depends on context. I listen to a pretty large amount of noise, drone and noisy, droney metal, so I find it hard to get fatigued; but certainly there's a few songs I have where the lack of dynamics (or sheer loudness, for that matter: I can't be the only one who finds it strange that Sigur Ros's Gong is louder then Electric Wizard's Dunwich) annoys me to no end.

Having said that, it seems that a lot of bands are starting to get some backlash to this: I guess the pursuit of old analog tone or what not has enabled this, and I think it's good. For a while, it seemed that the only band with good mastering (basically, the band is a lesson in excellent production) was Neurosis, but now more and more metal bands are dropping the peaks for dynamics, which overall I enjoy a great deal.

I can't really say as to what it's like in other genres, considering these days my music taste is more restrictive and limited then ever before 

[David_Dovey]

Yeah dude I'm at SAE. Were you doing Audio or one of the other courses?

I too have noticed that dynamics are starting to creep back in music, but on the other hand a lot of metal albums I loved were compressed to shit. I always found it weird that metal almost more than any other genre suffered from this problem considering

a) One of the main reasons albums get heavily compressed is because radio can't handle a large dynamic range and will get further compressed by the radio station, which can make a song sound much different to the recorded version. Metal shouldn't have to worry too much about what their songs are going to sound like on radio...

b) Most metal bands rely on, to some extent or another, a quiet/loud dynamic for moments of impact in the music. For example, two of my favourite metal albums last year started with quiet, clean album intros (such a single piano and voice) and then exploded into full wall-of-sound cacophonies. The problem being that both of these moments were castrated by the fact that the quiet bits with only two instruments were just as loud as the mult-multi-multi tracked heavy parts. The overall effect of this was that the "loud" parts actually sounded quieter than the "quiet" parts because the individual levels of each instrument was lower in the denser parts.

[Caspian]

Yeah dude I'm at SAE. Were you doing Audio or one of the other courses?

Yeah, I did Audio. Pretty good course, although the degree year is one hell of a lot more work.

[Daft pun]

That Stylus article really opened my eyes/ears at the time. My earbuds had just crapped out on me, so I bought some decent headphones to replace them. The difference that makes is pretty staggering, you start to hear so much more subtleties in the music. But the music that's been compressed starts to sound bland in comparison. It's just that most music today has been compressed, to a degree at the least.

Before then I thought Mogwai's Young Team was just very soft, but tracks like "Like Herod" wouldn't be half as awesome if they'd been compressed. You need the dynamics in there for the full effect.

Audacity is also a great way to see the difference compression makes. It's quite amazing to see just how much a track can be smeared out to make it sound louder.

[David_Dovey]

Indeed. I made a remix of Daft Punk's "Robot Rock" for lols, and when I imported the .wav file of the track into Pro-Tools to chop some samples out I was amazed at the flatness and loudness of the waveform. And when I played the file, it basically peaked straight away at just below (maybe 3dB) the point of distortion and more or less stayed there for the entire song.

[Patrick]

Every producer-to-be should just listen to "Decrescendo" by RX Bandits (they have it on here).

This is a band who does an absolute minimum of overdubs to get the sound they want, and as the title promises, there's a beautiful decrescendo about halfway through and they don't fuck with the levels on it.