Loudness War (Recording)

Sometime during the late 1990s, I found that my CDs of circa pre-1996 albums were drastically quieter than the newer CDs I bought. This phenomenon still plagues me to this day, as I have to constantly shift the volume when I listen to my ripped mp3 collection when they are shuffled on iTunes. (I am lazy to tell iTunes to normalize the levels in my collection.)

Long story short, the record industry created a culture of louder + more compression = better, and so they mastered most mainstream CDs to be loud to the point of clipping (the uncool kind of distortion). The richness of loud-soft dynamics is usually lost when compressor effects are used heavily. Here's an interesting YouTube video that boils down the situation:



For more information, do a Google search on the loudness war or read the Wikipedia article (for starters). When you are recording, try to make things dynamic and give your tracks some headroom. When you get to the mastering process, that's when you have to choose sides in the loudness war.

Happy recording!