The Loudness War is Over | Greg Reierson of Rare Form Mastering Writes About the Loudness War and Future of Music Delivery

10/30/13 7:58 PMThe Loudness War is Over | Greg Reierson of Rare Form Mastering Writes About the Loudness War and Future of Music Delivery

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The Loudness War is Over

Feb 8, 2011 2:22 PM, By Greg Reierson

Making loud CDs will become just a bad memory.

Editor's note: Mastering engineer Greg Reierson, who owns and operatesRare Form Mastering in Minneapolis, submitted the following essayreflecting on the loudness wars of recent years and the future of musicdelivery to Mix magazine.

A Fletcher-MunsonLoudness Curve

I was at the AES show in San Francisco last November and I came back withrenewed hope for the future of the music industrynot just from a businessperspective, but from a recording-quality perspective as well. Besides theusual discussions about gear and recording techniques, there was a lot of talkabout high resolution digital downloads surpassing CDs as the dominantdelivery format within the next few years. Optimism is growing as more andmore engineers are seeing a way to finally get past the loudness war.

Wait, the loudness war is over? Well, there are still plenty of soldiers who stillhavent gotten the message but the wheels are in motion. Its just a matter oftime now.



Consider this: The current loudness war is a product of the CD format andthe ability to play a song from CD A next to a song from CD B. Since themusic industry has never adopted loudness standards (like the longestablished standards in film and broadcast) weve been left to fight it out forourselves. No artist wants his or her music to sound quiet next to othermusic. Its human nature. So just to make sure, weve made em loudlouderevery year.

But heres the thing: The future of music delivery is not the CD. Sure, the CDwill be around for selling offstage and at gift shops, but the CD is on its wayout as the dominant delivery format. How many young music buyers actuallybuy CDs? How many artists primary delivery format will be CDs when therecording school graduates of 2011 are in the prime of their careers 10 yearsfrom now?

File based delivery is the future. Whether its iTunes, Pandora, iPods orwhatever, file based playback is how most people listen today and it willcompletely replace the CD in the very near future.

Okay, but how will this end the loudness war? Isnt shuffle mode on my iPodabout the same thing?

The solution is to find a way to automatically adjust the playback volume ona song-by-song (or album-by-album) basis. This can be accomplished byrunning an algorithm that determines the perceptual level of a given song oralbum and then digitally scaling the volume up or down to a standardizedcenter. Many media players have crude implementations of this idea alreadyin place. iTunes has Sound Check. Other players use Replay Gain, etc. Whilecurrent implementation of these processes has room for improvement, moresophisticated software has been developed and the next generation of mediaplayers will be much better at it than they are today. These are not dumb



processes that just apply a compressor or leveler. These are sophisticatedalgorithms that take a songs (or a whole albums) long-term dynamicattributes into account. With this sort of system in place, an early 80s metalsong, for example, will play back at the same perceived loudness as a metalsong from this year. And more to the point: a crushed-for-the-sake-of-loudness mix will play back no louder than any other mix from a comparablegenre in ones library.

Think about that for a second. In fact, try it. Find a great sounding, un-crushed song of your choice. Something with punch and dynamics. Youmight have to go back a decade or two. Now find a modern, loud song of asimilar genre. Put them both in your workstation and adjust the gain untileach plays back at the same apparent loudness. What will you hear? You willhear that the dynamic song moves some air and has punch and excitement,while the loud mix has been robbed of its punch by the process that made itloud in the first place.

As more people start to use media players that are equipped with these newtools, and when they understand that a well-implemented solution has nocompromises, over-compression and over-limiting purely for the sake ofmaking loud CDs will become just a bad memory. Production techniques willserve the artistic needs of the music rather than sacrificing quality for thesake of loudness. This is how we will put an end to the loudness war andbring great sounding mixes back to every genre.

Besides lots of great albums from the last decade (and many re-masters inevery genre) that have been run through the loudness mill, there will be twofinal casualties of this war. First are the software companies who are makinga killing selling loudness in the form of a plug-in. Those products will soon beobsolete. Put your maximizer, limiter and clipper team to work onbetter things, such as algorithms that can better measure loudness for the



next generation of media players.

The second casualty is the mixing or mastering engineer whose only realselling point (and sometimes only actual skill) is making songs louder. Thejig is up! Theres just no value in that line of work any more. Youll have tolearn how to make songs sound better, which is not quite as easy as justmaking things louder.

The rest of the audio engineering and music listening world welcomes theend of the war. Now we can all get back to our regularly scheduled sessions,making great sounding music without that slap in the face at the end. Nowrecording and mixing engineers can focus on sound quality without having topush mixes past the point of reason. And now mastering engineers can focuson making those mixes sound their best out in the real world without havingto unnecessarily limit and clip and crush, and [perform] all of the othercompromises that have become part of the game. Hows that for retro,vintage, and old school?

Best of all, now the end listener can really hear music the way the artist hearsit, with all of the punch and impact and much, much less of the distortionand processing artifacts that weve been living with for the past decade. Thisis awesome news if you love music!

Theres one more group that stands to gain big time: all of the youngengineers who have not yet learned the bad habits of the past decade. Theywill begin their careers ahead of this new learning curve. Recording-schoolteachers are on the front lines. Let this be a tool to help their studentsunderstand that loudness is not really the reason we are all here. Its themusic. And the job just got a lot more fun!

There will still be people who want loud CDs, and thats okay. Some styles ofmusic really do sound best pushed to the limit. A good mastering engineer



can make a loud CD from a great sounding dynamic mix. The good news is hewill also be able to make a great sounding, dynamic master for any futureformat that comes along. There is no longer any valid reason to ruin a greatsounding song for the sake of a dying format.

Now go out and spread the word. Tell your friends to experiment with SoundCheck and Replay Gain and to watch for the new standards to take shape.Use these tools to help even the playing field for great sounding, dynamicmixes and our sonic universe will be a better place.

R.I.P. Loudness War. Pass it on.

Greg Reierson is the owner/chief engineer at Rare Form Mastering inMinneapolis. Visit him at www.rareformmastering.com.

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The Loudness War is Over | Greg Reierson of Rare Form Mastering Writes About the Loudness War and Future of Music Delivery