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Some of this is just plain wrong. He's confusing the differences between compression as used in recording and as used in mastering an playback media.
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| Rock and pop producers have always used compression to balance the sounds of different instruments and to make music sound more exciting, and radio stations apply compression for technical reasons. In the days of vinyl rec- ords, there was a physical limit to how high the bass levels could go before the needle skipped a groove. CDs can handle higher levels of loudness, although they, too, have a limit that engineers call "digital zero dB," above which sounds begin to distort. Pop albums rarely got close to the zero-dB mark until the mid-1990s, when digital compressors and limiters, which cut off the peaks of sound waves, made it easier to manipulate loudness levels. Intensely compressed albums like Oasis' 1995 (What's the Story) Morning Glory? set a new bar for loudness; the songs were well-suited for bars, cars and other noisy environments. "In the Seventies and Eighties, you were expected to pay attention," says Matt Serletic, the former chief executive of Virgin Records USA, who also produced albums by Matchbox Twenty and Collective Soul. "Modern music should be able to get your attention." Adds Rob Cavallo, who produced Green Day's American Idiot and My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade, "It's a style that started post-grunge, to get that intensity. The idea was to slam someone's face against the wall. You can set your CD to stun. |
It's more complicated than this. There is no difference really between bands and record execs wanting their stuff to sound as loud as possible on the radio back in the 1960s and now.
A transistor radio speaker then was on the whole about the same quality as your average computer speaker now. What's changed is the production and playback technology and this is mainly down to everything now being digital.
First off a CD is compressed compared to an open reel master tape by virtue of the format itself. Digital recording formats have different limitations to those of analogue formats but on the face of it they require less skill to master.
When you apply overdrive or similar effects to a guitar you're really adding analogue distortion which is what you want for most rock music. This is the way electric guitars are meant to sound. With an analogue desk and tape recorder you can turn all the gains upto 11 and the distortion from your desk will just add to the distortion from your pedals, the tape won't be able to deal with the peaks so will just naturally compress them adding slightly more fuzz as it overloads. This is the sound of rock, the sound of motown, the sound of most music made before the age of digital recording, the sound many bands today are busy trying to recreate unsuccessfully.
When you try to do this with a digital desk you can't overdrive it because then you get digital distortion which sounds like a CD skipping. So you have to keep the levels to below "Digital 0". Digital zero is not 0dB which is what you see on an analogue VU meter on a tape recorder, rather it's this -20dB. "Digital 0" is actually analogue 0 turned down 20dB and unlike analogue 0dB which with good tape heads you can pass by 10dBs, "Digital 0" is absolute, it allows no "head-room".
What's more on PCM digital distortion increases as amplitude falls. So while CD has .0001 or whatever distortion figures on average much much lower than analogue, this is only the case as long as you keep everything turned up as loud as possible.
When the signal gets down to about -50dBs distortion on a CD is actually more like 1% which is really no better than analogue tape and in many ways far worse as digital distortion isn't a gentle hiss like tape but more of a random static.
The loudness war is something that's been fought since the days of Jukebox's back in the '50s only the tools have changed and while of course it's possible to get amazing recordings on a CD, it's a deceptively simple process and the wider availablility of music making afforded by technology plus the limitations of this format are what's really to blame for your headaches.
