This is the title of an article by Bob Speer of CD Mastering Services on the degradation of dynamic range in contemporary pop music CDs. It’s provocative:
“The music available today isn’t musical at all. It’s best described as anti-music. It’s anti-music because the life is being squashed out of it through over compression during the tracking, mixing, and mastering stages. It’s simply, non musical. It’s no wonder that consumers don’t want to pay for the CDs being produced today. …. It’s time for all of us in the music industry to wake up! Our musical heritage is being threatened by this wave of anti-music.”
Read the article, then go to the links near the end, where you can see comparisons like this:
1983 CD:
and a 1999 CD:
I’m not a big fan of pop music, but I have been noticing the compression and actual hard clipping described in these articles when listening to the radio. I attributed this distortion to poor engineering at the radio station, but it appears the CDs are now being made “radio-ready” by being clipped and distorted already.
Sometimes clipping and overdrive has its place - just listen to some of the old Motown records. However, this modern clipping is hard, digital clipping, not the softer clipping of a tube mixer or magnetic tape.
The push for louder music comes from radio station managers who think that, as a listener spins the tuning dial, they will stop at the “loudest” station. This may be true for heavy metal rocker who is loosing his hearing but wants “more”, or for someone with a crappy radio where a soft sound is equated with a weak signal, but is increasingly no longer the case. More people are listening to music over the computer or through satellite radio, where station selection is no longer so applicable. Most radios are digitally synthesized, so “spinning the dial” doesn’t happen any more, either.
I found this article through a link on Ran Prieur’s web site, where he uses the metaphor of what’s happening to music to what is happening to modern life. Maybe not everyone’s cup of tea, but worth considering.
Radio station manager. Almost sounds like a real job. Pop recording engineer. Almost sounds like a real job. Improvised explosive device. Almost sounds like a real weapon. If anti-music is the choice of the Big Sox Music Big Boss of Everything Nerds, fine. I might buy some of their discs, but, I won’t listen very often. Sigh. Richard Starkey, we hardly new ye. Even the 3/4″ drivers on this computer monitor are much too revealing to enjoy “Vertical Man”. Sigh.
My guess is that extreme compression is a consequence of portable music. I would guess that most radio listening is in-car or the workplace where there is high ambient background. Plus the download generation play use their iPods on buses, subways and out in the street.
I don’t like the trend but I can appreciate why it has grown in proportion to portable MP3 sales. We have to accept that audiophiles seeking the ultimate in fidelity are a minority - the majority listen to 2 channel audio as a background soundtrack.
A recently commercial survey here in the UK found that for new Brit bands (whatever they are!) 70% of album sales are on vinyl. That’s right for new releases vinyl now outsells CD!
I think this goes a long way to explaining that statistic.
Both my sons record their own music, both are in bands and write and perform their own music, and it has taken me about a year to get them to understand how to record without clipping the sound. AT first they they couldn’t even hear it unless it was really bad because they were used to hearing it as part of the music… They were always puzzled as to why my records sounded cleaner and more dynamic than their CDs and recordings… now they know and can get even better quality themselves but it was a long haul to get them there.
Can someone explain to me why years of technology development by very bright people resulted in worse sound?
James