Digital Zero

I ended up reading a couple of articles here and here that helped me consider what's going on in music today. Maybe its not just the modern artistic quality that I find revolting, but the technical aspects of modern recording. At the heart of the discussion is "the loudness war." Music recordings are consistently getting louder, by the addition of limiters and compression, and then the quietest parts of the recording are brought up to the highest volume, leaving a giant wall-of-sound, with no dynamic differences. Any aesthetic values created by quiet or softer sounds is lost, as is the dramatic interaction between varying volumes, and any "punch" or intensity by allowing sounds to stand above the rest. The average volumes have gone from -20db to -5db, so this has pushed all the instruments into the same sonic space, and left only 5dbs of overhead for any "movement", or for anything such as kick drums to stand out. This also results in digital artifacts, as the original sounds are "clipped" off. As much of the waveform is squared off, the original performance is degraded. The final outcome is that much of the musicality of the sound turns into white noise.

This helps explain why I find new music offensive to my ears and my brain - it becomes fatiguing and disorienting, like psychological warfare. Obviously, its part of current dance and pop music. It also seems to part of the fabric of new sounds such as nu-metal, and why I think otherwise interesting bands end up sounding horrible. Much of the rationale behind this trend, is simply that it is a trend, and everybody wants their recordings to be fresh and current, like everybody else. Now, listeners of new music are so accustomed to this practice, that they don't realize its detrimental effects on the music, and why older, more dynamic, music might be richer and more apprehendable to the brain's ability to sonically comprehend what it hears and aesthtically interpret it.

One of the earliest controversies over this started with 2002's Vapor Trails from Rush. What could possibly be one of their best albums, artistically and musically, is almost unlistenable because of the recording - it just hits your ears like a full frontal assault. We have reached a point where technology should give us more fidelity, such as 24 bit /192khz recordings. We have SACD, DVD-A, as well as the more common, but excellent 5.1 CDs and DVDs, but all the dynamic room in these is going to waste on newer recordings.