I googled “loudness wars” and came up with some interesting info, including a wikipedia article.
The guy you linked to should have a graph showing higher amplitudes, so that it will be abundantly clear that the music is literally cutting off at the amplitude it does.
Or does the max amplitude reflect some limitation of the hardware? If that’s so, that should be made explicit for the music-production-ignorant such as myself.
-FrL-
This Wikipedia article gives a decent enough explination of how compression works.
The graphics in interface2x’s link are quite good. Imagine this:
You have a waveform, with peaks and troughs; your y axis is roughly showing ‘loudness’ at any given point.
Your maximum volume on your output is going to be limited by the loudest point in the waveform. If that horn solo can only be so loud before clipping, then you set your output so that the solo is as loud as it can be, and all other dynamic levels follow from that.
Ok, good. So, what if there are quiet bits that you wish could be louder. Well, without compression, you can’t make them louder without distorting the loudest parts. Compression brings the loudness level down, only when the loudness reaches a specific point. In effect, it flattens the waveform. The quietest parts still look just like they did, but the loud parts come down. You can do this until most of your sound is pretty much at the same level, which would look like a solid bar on your graph. But, it’d be pretty quiet. So, you turn up your output gain to the maximum loudness before clipping. But now, instead of just the horn solo being that loud, the entire song is at full volume.
In those graphics, it’s not that the waveform is limited by the graph, it’s just that the waveform has been compressed and then ‘turned up’ to maximum volume.
Of course, that person’s methodology might not have been that good, and it could be that his input to whatever recording device he used is just turned up too high; it’s hard to say. Regardless, what he describes can and does happen often, and roughly looks like what he’s got displayed.
Thanks for that.
Is there, somewhere online, a nice “side-by-side” demonstration of this phenomenon? Where, for example, I could listen to a track both with and without this kind of treatment having been applied?
-FrL-
And, to confuse things, a lot of audio data compression wrecks the dynamic range on songs (albeit through a different method). So, listening to an example of a compressed track and a non-compressed track via MP3 is not really going to illustrate the difference you’re looking for.
You’re welcome. I’m not aware of anywhere online to compare such a thing, as it involves copyright and all that. If you wanted to e-mail me, I could send you an example or two.
You can get drinks at the Hollywood Bowl. I’d hardly consider it a bar though.
This illustrates a change in radio.
I never made this claim. I don’t begrudge anyone their success. But if someone is not happy with what the radio is feeding them, look a little deeper. There is a lot of great stuff being produced in lots of different syles and genres, And very often, they are playing venus much bigger than bars.
I don’t agree about the music either. Mid-30s seems a decade too old; I think most people’s musical tastes tend to calcify in their 20s.
Commentary from an Old Fart™: rock is so dark, earnest, serious and DULL.
Lighten up already.
The real disconnect happened in the mid-to-late 1990s, at the end of the grunge era, when I was in my very early 30s. Before then, if I heard a song on the radio, I could tell with almost certain confidence who the artist was. If someone mentioned the name of a band to me, songs they performed would come to mind, and I’d have a solid image of their style; what makes them different than other performers in the same genre.
I draw the “calcification line” in two places:
1995, the year after the San Francisco season of The Real World. I felt like I could identify with the 1994 RW cast, like they were a part of my generation. After that, the Real Worlders seemed like a bunch of damn kids that I wanted to chase off my lawn. Friggin’ spoiled brats in London, the whole lot of 'em. (grumble grumble)
The rise of nu-metal in the late 1990s. While I could tell the difference bewtween the music of various grunge bands, if I heard a nu-metal song I was totally clueless about whether it was by Korn, Staind, Limp Bizkit or someone else. For some other forms of pop/rock music, my identification skills were somewhat better, but they quickly became spotty after the late 1990s. “Is that Hole or Garbage?”
Now I fear turning into my parents, whose musical tastes solidified just before the rise of rock. More often than not they botched the names of bands popular in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s - “Grey Zeppelin”, “Hydroelectric Orchestra”, “Fleetwood Tramp”, “Van Heusen” and so on. So many band names now sound the same to me. “Oh, it’s Sean Paul, not Jean Paul!” Sure, there’s names that seem “clear” like The White Stripes, Five for Fighting and Nickelback, but when I delve into emo and indie territory, where bands get more respect with obscurity, I can forget it. Same thing with rap, where it’s a jumble of initials and misspelled names. “D.B. Killah-Z Yo” could just as well be a real group name if someone mentioned it to me.
“I used to be with it, but then they changed what “it” was. Now, what I’m with isn’t it, and what’s “it” seems weird and scary to me. It’ll happen to yooooouuuu…”
–Abraham Simpson
As for places to hear good new music, we have a local NPR show, Out of the Box, here that is all new music, but from many lesser known artists. A lot of interesting stuff. You can check it out online here.
Hehe Thanks for reminding me that The Simpsons is still funny, sometimes.
(Or maybe that’s an older quote!)
-FrL-
I disagree that one’s actual musical TASTE calicifies at a certain age–but I will agree that after a certain point in life one is less likely to be able to definitively identify a certain artist hearing a new song by that artist. I’m shoving hard at fifty, but my music library contains quite a bit of new stuff–a small sampling of “newer” musicians I find amusing:
Barenaked Ladies
Beastie Boys
Bloodhound Gang
Brian Jonestown Massacre
Cake
Camper Van Beethoven
Chemical Brothers
Control Machete
Cracker
The Cramps
Daft Punk
Dandy Warhols
Decemberists
Everclear
Fat Boy Slim
Filter
G Love and Special Sauce
Godsmack
Gorillaz
Insane Clown Posse
Kid Rock
Kings of Leon
Kula Shaker
Lords of Acid
Los Lobos
Luscious Jackson
Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos
Marcy Playground
Marilyn Manson
Massive Attack
Me First and the Gimme Gimmes
Modest Mouse
Morcheeba
Morphine
Mos Def
Neotropic
Nirvana
Offspring
Old 97s
Os Mutantes
Poe
Portishead
Presidents of the USA
Primus
Puddle of Mudd
Radiohead
Ramones
Reverend Horton Heat
Richard Cheese
Rob Zombie
Romeo Void
Screaming Trees
She Wants Revenge
Sister Soleil
Soul Coughing
Soundgarden
Stone Temple Pilots
Sublime
System of a Down
The 5.6.7.8s
The B-52s
Tool
Treat Her Right
Veruca Salt
Verve Pipe
Weezer
None of these artists were extant during my “formative music acquisition” years, but it doesn’t stop me from enjoying the music and I find new stuff every day that I like. I just can’t identify the songs by name as well, or remember the names of the band as well as I can the stuff I listened to in high school. I can still sing old songs word perfectly as soon as I hear them, but it’s harder for me to learn the lyrics of newer songs.
I suspect the reason most people don’t acquire new music is that they feel embarrassed at not being able to quote chapter and verse about new artists, and younger people who are in the target demographic are more likely to know all the intimate details of the artists and lyrics. Maybe we feel that we don’t really “like” music unless we know it exhaustively–maybe society tells us we don’t “really” like music unless we know all the trivia attendant on each song. I talk music with my kids all the time and they get frustrated with me because I don’t remember titles and artists, but if I hear a song I like I can remember the tune, might know some of the lyrics, might be able to identify the artist, but it’s by no means the slam dunk to identify that music from 65-80 would be. Go ahead, just try to stump me in the music category of Trivial Pursuit Baby Boomer, I double dog dare ya! 
Oh, and here’s a neat bit of trivia for you all–how many of you know that Death Cab for Cutie took their name from a Bonzo Dog Doodah Band song? That was Neil Innes’ band before he signed on with Monty Python… Freaked out some twenty something friends of mine when I brought that song in to work… Us old dogs learn our tricks slowly and incompletely, perhaps, but sometimes we can surprise the hell outta the young pups!
I aksed the same question a while ago. The consensus answer was pretty much “because you are old”.
I’m going to be the third poster to chime in with “The White Stripes” for a relatively new group that doesn’t suck.
They do play old blues though which is why my 33 yr old ears might like it so much. Then again I saw tons of teeny-boppers bouncing along to a Son House song that they cover when I saw them live.
I just thought it was cool because that song is probably older than their parents.
You must be joking.
I can think of dozens of bands now regarded as giants who could barely get airplay in the 70s and 80s (in the US at least). Here’s a short list off the top of my head:
The Clash (barely nicked the charts three times, I believe)
The Ramones
The Pretenders (scored some minor hits, but very underplayed on radio)
The Talking Heads (ditto)
R.E.M. (Put out four great albums and a great EP before getting significant airplay)
The Pogues
Elvis Costello
They Might Be Giants
Devo
The Pixies
The Replacements
Hüsker Dü
Jane’s Addiction
Minutemen
Meat Puppets
The Smiths
The Cure
Echo and the Bunnymen
Etc., etc., etc…
Most of those groups couldn’t get significant airplay in the US, except on college radio stations. They were regarded in the US as “alternative music” (back when that phrase had meaning).
If that doesn’t happen to me in the next eight months, I guess that’s a bullet I’ve dodged. My tastes have definitely changed in my twenties, but it’s just that the even mix of liking commerical and indie/obscure has tilted heavily in favor of the latter. I’ve made peace with the fact that most of the CDs I want lately are hard to find in physcial stores, even in Indie music stores. I doubt anyone I know in RL ordered CDs by Breck Alan or Seventeen lately.
Actually, I don’t even expect people I interact with every day to know the vast majority of the bands on the mixed CD I made myself this week.
Those marked with * I have a reasonable expectation that many people know who they are, those with # have a lesser known following so someone I talk to might know who the hell I’m talking about. The rest…
Alexz Johnson - Skin
Egypt Central - Over and Under
Granian - Contagious
Cavalier King - The Unprotected
The Meices - Yeah
The Prom Kings - Bleeding
Thousand Foot Krutch - Move
Hinder - Get stoned
No One Goes Home - Be Still My Love
Mendoza Line - Let’s Not Talk About It
Starving Zealots - Spent
The way I look at it, though, I’d rather have a steady stream of good music no one knows about to listen to, then listen to stale stuff everyone’s heard of. Plus, I like to inflict my music on the unsuspecting, and convert them 
http://www.purevolume.com/ is a good starting point for finding new stuff you might like since most of the artists have streaming audio, if not MP3 downloads. Just keep hitting random artist until you find one you like.
Except on MTV. They certainly got exposure to the masses. of music fands. 
Typos, typos, typos. I suck.
I have the good fortune to reside in Australia. We have a government funded radio and TV network, the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) and among the things it broadcasts are programs targetted at the under 25 market. They have an all night clip show on TV every Friday and Saturday night. Here are their playlists. They regularly play things I have never heard before so I stick in a tape before I go to bed and replay it as background music to see what new treats I can discover.
But even better is 2JJJ, Triple J, the Js the national youth broadcaster. I have been listening to them for 30 years, since I was on the outer edge of their demographic. I can always find things that I like but they don’t play much that you would hear on commercial radio. Check out their playlists and have a listen online.
To be as polite about this as possible, my guess is that the problem is with the listerner, not the music.
I’m not sure why I’m meant to be justifying my music to you, but, anyway, here are a few contemporary artists that are both popular and good:
Jay-Z, Beyonce, Modest Mouse, The Killers (singles, not so much albums), T.I., Lil’ Wayne, Kanye West, Justin Timberlake (especially his new record), Young Jeezy, Nelly Furtado (new album is pretty great), Green Day, Fall Out Boy, Radiohead, Nas, Outkast, R. Kelly, E-40, Kelis.
There is excessive compression on a lot of modern recordings, but Wilco and Sufjan Stevens are two recent artists I can think of who do make of use of the possibilities offered by a recording’s dynamic range. Listen to the opening track of Wilco’s A Ghost Is Born, , “At Least That’s What You Said”, and you definitely notice it.
A good part of the reason modern recordings are excessively loud is because they can be - don’t for a moment think that old artists were somehow “better” in their recording techniques. The loudness war existed in the '60s, but engineers today have the technology to let them really screw things up. If they could have done it back in the '60s, they would have.