[Anaxilus]

The term is Compression.  This is usually how they get the recordings loud.  Compressing the wave form.

 

[eugenius]

No, the clipping is not the problem, there are whole music genres built around clipping, the problem is the dynamic range.

 

[Redcarmoose]

Things are always changing. Early Living Stereo LPs had a certain sound, mid seventies rock had a certain sound and todays recordings have a certain sound. It's one of the cool things about having and enjoying a lot of music.
 
 
 
There has always been audiophile music. If you look for well recorded music it's always out there. I do have to agree that there has been a trend which seems to be geared toward making mixes sound good on cheep systems. I figure that is what popular music gets played on 90% of the time and it is what it is. Looking back at classic well produced albums which were main stream in the mid 1970s does make you wonder where the quality went? The overall vibe has been lost to a certain extent. I listen to mostly extreme metal. 
 
Now days it seems metal music is being recorded all over the world and even though not mainstream, there  is a release of a new album every other day. More music is being released than ever before and as a whole it sounds pretty good. The big issue is what I like to call digital wetness. The term was what we used to use years ago when the first software synths where first invented. We had old rigs that just by their nature produced big fat lush warm tone. These computer synths were easy to use and program but it was really hard to get your mix to not sound "wet". This was where all the musical parts seemed to blend together and nothing stood out on it's own, no matter what you did. New equipment came out which could warm up the tracks but underneath it all was still this wetness.
 
 
Now with software synths such a big part of mainstream music this wetness is the after effect of the whole process. It really takes a master to get everything to sound halfway right. I still think it's the lack of old school tape recorders not being used. Modern recording processes, even though they have some great aspects still leave the music missing some soul. This ends up being the whole anti digital argument in the end, but that is still what I see as being the cause. Loudness has always been a trademark of the radio friendly music output. Now though we have the wetness of digital also to contend with. I just except it and try to enjoy the new releases, as some are really good and well recorded.     

 

[kingpage]

 
Quote:

The problem with the loudness war to me is not loudness but when a recorded track is so loud it clips (aka death magnetic of metallica). I have no issue with loud recordings in fact i prefer it.

The reason why it easily clips is because of the loudness. You're contradicting yourself. You can't have both loudness and less propensity to clip.

 

[bcasey25raptor]

Quote:

 

The reason why it easily clips is because of the loudness. You're contradicting yourself. You can't have both loudness and less propensity to clip.

Keep it a few dbs before it reaches clipping point.

 

[kingpage]

Well, basically you can make it as loud as you want regardess of how "loud" the music it. I just think the music producers think we are so stupid that we don't know where the volume knob is. I do agree, dynamic range is more important and there should be a standard maximum level music can go relative to 0dB.

 

[bcasey25raptor]

Quote:

Well, basically you can make it as loud as you want regardess of how "loud" the music it. I just think the music producers think we are so stupid that we don't know where the volume knob is. I do agree, dynamic range is more important and there should be a standard maximum level music can go relative to 0dB.

Hate to break it to you but 1980s iron maiden (dynamic recorded) doesn't get loud enough without an amplifier even with my hd 25s. Listen to where eagles dare original recording and tell me that is not substantially quiet. If thats what proper recording sounds like i don't buy it. Even and justice for all by metallica was pretty damn quiet as well that i need to turn it all the way up.

 

[kingpage]

A little headroom is generally accepted as good practice in the music industry. That is, until the marketing people forced producers to make the headroom as little as possible (even to the point of clipping) so that when it is played on radio or TV or your iPod it will sound "better" than the other music because it is louder than them. That's how the loudness war began.

 

[bcasey25raptor]

Quote:

A little headroom is generally accepted as good practice in the music industry. That is, until the marketing people forced producers to make the headroom as little as possible (even to the point of clipping) so that when it is played on radio or TV or your iPod it will sound "better" than the other music because it is louder than them. That's how the loudness war began.

I agree that dynamics are important. But if there is a huge variation between say the guitars and percussions then it can be a little quiet for some things when you don't want it to be. I don't agree with much of the loudness war to a certain extent but i find many medium loudness recorded albums to be just fine. Something like death magnetic though is blown out of proportion and actually hurts to listen to. I have heard many loudly recorded songs which were very dynamic and had very good sound quality.

 

[Redcarmoose]

 
"Even and justice for all by metallica was pretty damn quiet as well that i need to turn it all the way up."
 
Justice For All is kind of a one off sound for Metallica. I have the original LP, the rerelease LP and they all have an underground sound. There is no other Metallica record like it. People love the music in it though. Not only does in have a limited sound stage it is compressed too.

 

[tkteo]

I was listening to Adele's "21" and it's loud.

 

[Nazo]

Hate to break it to you but 1980s iron maiden (dynamic recorded) doesn't get loud enough without an amplifier even with my hd 25s. Listen to where eagles dare original recording and tell me that is not substantially quiet. If thats what proper recording sounds like i don't buy it. Even and justice for all by metallica was pretty damn quiet as well that i need to turn it all the way up.

It sounds to me like your problem is just that the actual volume levels in the recordings themselves with older recordings are lower. The first stage of the Loudness War was just in raising the volume levels (hence the clipping during the earlier years as they raised it too far and actually mastered some albums with clipping in the tracks.) I'm actually with you in that I see no reason not to master them at a reasonable volume level -- though I think it would be better to follow standards like ReplayGain (though then other equipment needs to be adjusted. I use MP3Gain which uses the same basic calculations to apply the volume to a MP3 more permanently for devices that don't support ReplayGain, aka just about everything that isn't a computer, and I've found that the volumes on these devices often aren't sufficient anymore because they assume you're listening to the music in its original master volumes... I've had to actually raise the volume well above the recommended 89dB to get along with all of my embedded and near embedded devices.) The cool thing about ReplayGain and things like it are that you can actually get the volumes of everything at very similar levels such that you no longer have to dive for the volume control every time you get something from a different album...

However, don't confuse one type of loudness for another. Your issue with that recording is just the volume itself, not the dynamics by what you're saying. While they do need to work on their usage of volume levels even still today (ironically I think more in the other direction -- many today are normalized to over 100dB somehow, which does not go over well with the medium, but yes, some of the older songs needed to have been higher than they were) the compression of dynamics is a completely different matter. It really does take a lot of the "fun" out of a song even. Yes, it sounds louder, but it's louder in the same way that if your amplifier has a ridiculously high noise floor, the total volume level is louder. Music, by nature, is supposed to be more dynamic, so this isn't just a matter of the current and previous generations of music having a particular "sound" to them as this is still all being done in the production processes, not in the original music. Consider also that this processing exists only in the albums. There are many reasons so many people today prefer live versions, and this is one of the big ones (though it's funny how many of them just think it "sounds better" without knowing why.) And remember, there are those who say that the games sound better too. As silly as that may seem, the fact is, they're just not processing them as much for the games for various reasons.

I think you might want to play around with ReplayGain for whenever you're listening on anything that supports it btw. You might find that suits you pretty well.

 

[markanini]

I think the loud trend has reversed a bit over the last five years, at least for the non-mainstream stuff I listen to which often includes re-issues of old recordings. It's still loud but a notch or two less extreme and usually more of a compressed sound than a brick-walled and distorted sound. Phew!

 

[manveru]

I wish I had a special time machine that makes all your music as if it were recorded in the 70's. 

 

[sml1226]

The problem with the loudness war to me is not loudness but when a recorded track is so loud it clips (aka death magnetic of metallica). I have no issue with loud recordings in fact i prefer it.

Well that's the whole reason behind the negative connotation of "loudness war" isn't it?

I just got the HDTracks release of Nevermind (didn't want to spend $80 on the LPs even though it looks amazing) and the levels are pretty high, constantly peaking around 0dB, but it never clips once and it sounds amazing. Now that I have seen that these flaws are in the release leveling and not the mastering (Metallica's Metallica masters through HD Tracks are amazingly good and my CD rip clips all over the place) I'm tempted to buy everything I can through MoFi and HD Tracks now to take essentially the only way around metal releases other than buying vinyl (which I'll still definitely do on the rarer or limited run ones).