Talk of the Loudness Nation

I appeared on NPR's Talk of the Nation program today, chatting with host Neal Conen and fellow audio obsessives across this great land. The podcast is here if you're interested. But thinking back to what I said, I want to use this space to talk a little about the Loudness War, a subject on which I don't think I was as coherent as I could be. I devote a chapter to it in Perfecting Sound Forever, but for those who are new to the subject, here's a quick primer.

Beginning in the early '90s, CD's have been made to sound increasingly louder. A louder CD is one that sounds loud even if your volume is low. That sounds tautological, but one defining characteristic of loudness is that it is not an objective criteria. Case in point: It's pretty common to reach for the remote when a TV show goes to a commercial, because the commercial seems abrasively loud. But the signal the station is putting out probably has the same maximum peak at all times. The difference is that the peak is reached only sporadically during the programming, but almost incessantly during the commercial. By the same token, a classical radio station and a hip-hop radio station may be broadcasting at the same peak levels. But the classical station is hitting that peak once a minute, wheras the hip-hop station is reaching it every second. So the hip-hop station sounds louder.

Our ears perceive loudness based on average levels. The commercial and the hip-hop station, by hitting their peak more often, have a higher average level, so they sound louder, even if they aren't peaking any higher than the TV show or the classical station.

This is the psychoacoustic underpinning of what has come to be called the loudness war in CD mastering. Basically, mastering engineers take the music and compress its dynamic range, the difference between the softest and loudest parts of the signal. The average level of the music increases, and the music sounds louder.

To hear the loudness war in action, just load up your CD changer with discs that span the last 15 years or so, and play them on shuffle. You'll probably notice that you're constantly having to adjust the volume, increasing it for the older CD's and decreasing it for the newer ones.

I'll have more to say very soon about what this all means for the music we hear. But for now, watch this clip, which does a remarkably good job of summarizing the effects of dynamic range compression on music.

"And you may find yourself at Edison's house, on a beautiful bike..."

Motivated by Perfecting Sound Forever, David Byrne bikes over to Edison's house while on tour. (Unfortuntately, he finds it closed.) Coincidentally, he's in Montclair, site of the tone test that opens the book.

Way back in the '80's, Talking Heads was one of the bands that got me thinking about some of the central issues in the book. I bought the soundtrack to Stop Making Sense (before seeing the movie), in a "special edition" cassette release that came with an oversize booklet. (That day I also bought the "Survival Sampler," a Sire Records sampler cassette that came in a can made to look like army rations.) I remember thinking about how I liked the studio version of "Once In a Lifetime" better than the live version, because the studio version sounded more exciting, more "immediate" and "real," even though, like the rest of Remain In Light, it was obviously a very constructed document. That's the paradox of live recordings. The liveness makes the music sounds sort of diffuse, which imparts a certain distance between the listener and the music.

While we're on the subject, however, I gotta say I much prefer the solo-beatbox version of "Psycho Killer" to the one on Talking Heads '77. And now that we're on that subject, when I interviewed Tony Bongiovi, who produced that debut, he said he replaced some of Tina Weymouth's bass parts without telling anyone in the band. He recruited Bob Babbitt, a Motown session bassist, and instructed him to try not to make his playing sound too "professional," so that it would sound more like Weymouth's playing. Bongiovi didn't say which songs received the Babbitt treatment, but check out "Smiling Faces Sometimes" by the Undisputed Truth, and tell me that Babbitt's bass doesn't sound a lot like the opening of "Psycho Killer."

Anyway, it's nice to get some early feedback on the book from someone who inadvertently inspired it.