Metallica are the undisputed champions of the loudness wars, with their 2008 album Death Magnetic blowing away the competition and retaining the No.1 spot for all eternity, as being way too fucken loud. (Great album BTW!) And thank god they did, because it shocked the entire online music industry into bringing in loudness controls. Saving us from what could have been decades of music that was only just barely tolerable. But the job is only half done.
But, why is loudness even something to go to war over?
Imagine you’re at a party and the stereo is playing just below talking volume, then a new song comes on which is just above talking volume. You will naturally feel like the louder song sounds better. But, if we take the same two songs, only this time the first is playing a lot louder than talking volume, then the second song starts up much quieter, but at the same level as before just above talking volume, now you will naturally feel like the second song sounds worse than the first even tho it’s being played at the exact same volume as before. This is because turning music up is awesome, and turning it down isn’t. Everybody knows this.
The current goal of streaming platforms is to have every song at the same loudness so that nobody has to adjust their volume for each song if they don’t want to. This is achieved by using the LUFS measurement system. To put it bluntly, what they’re currently doing sucks. Yes, it’s better than having nothing at all. And yes, it did stop bands from having to destroy their mixes to get them up to the same loudness as their rivals. But that’s pretty much all the good you can say about it.
The reason the LUFS system has ultimately failed is because it rewards excessively loud transients (think super tight snare drum sounds that are right in your face the whole time) and thin, bone dry mixes (to eliminate any of the lovely ambient or subsonic sounds that might move the blunt instrument/LUFS measurement in the wrong direction). The current chart hits right now all sound like vocals and snare drums, with some quiet background music thrown in. If you turn it up loud you’ll get some thump and rumble, but you’ll still have the tight dry snare and vocals right in your face the whole time. This is only going to get worse as engineers get better at maximizing the “Perceived Loudness.”
Understanding Perceived Loudness is the key to understanding why the LUFS system fails. You can have two tracks with the exact same LUFS score, but one is perceived to be a lot louder than the other. It’s all to do with how the human ear drum separates sounds. 1.5 Khz is the ears preferred frequency, as this is where the human voice tends to live on the frequency spectrum. Our ear will make anything at that frequency seem louder so we can hear each other talking in noisy environments. So, if you want your track to feel like it’s louder (when it’s not) then you need to max out this frequency (with your super tight snare drum and super dry vocal sound). Because, if you don’t do this your track will naturally feel like it’s not as good as the ones that do sound louder, which is basically a death sentence in the modern streaming environment. ie: do it, or die cold and alone with no hits!
What’s even worse with this current state of mixing is that when you mix right into the human voice frequencies it becomes hard to think clearly when listening to your favorite music. This should shock everyone!
This all happens because when your ears hear the human voice frequencies (HVF’s) it triggers your mind to focus on the world around you, instead of your own thoughts, so you can engage in conversation properly. But, with this current mixing trend even having a conversation when music is playing isn't great, as it competes for the same attention centers in the brain and makes you uncomfortable trying to focus on both the music and your friend at the same time. It’s gotten so bad that the factory I work in has just banned music from the floor (using some weird Royalties for Public Broadcasts BS as the reason). But, nobody cares that every day is the day the music died! It’s just easier to get work done now.
The solution:
In the music biz the Yamaha NS10s are industry standard mixing monitors. These were originally created to be mid quality book shelf speakers, but somehow they became essential kit in the most high end studios all over the world. There’s loads of theories out there about why this happened. The real reason is that they have a massive frequency boost right in the HVF’s. This means if you want your mix to sound good on these speakers you have to EQ most of the HVF’s out. Doing this is so good that albums mixed on NS10s sold so many more copies than one’s mixed on flat response speakers that everyone in the industry was forced to use them, or die cold and alone with no hits. Until the loudness wars began of course!
So the solution, to the current streaming driven industry standard mixes being super distracting at work and real fucken ugly to have on at your party, is getting the streaming platforms to put an EQ filter on before the LUFS meter so that mixes with the old school low-HVF levels end up with the same Perceived Volume as the current crop of awful maxed-out-HVF's masters.
Here’s the frequency spectrum coming out of an NS10 speaker, which in the mid-range is the exact opposite of what you naturally want music to sound like.
These nasty speakers are only really useful for mixing the mid-range, as there's no bass and the treble is all over the place. But when you mix the mid-range through them it's pure gold on any other speaker.
I’d bet big money that if an EQ filter matching the NS10s spectrum (along with a super tight transient booster) was used by streaming platforms (in front of the very blunt LUFS meter), we could all get back to listening to music like we did in the 80s. Full spectrum kick and bass sounds, loads of reverb and ambient effects. Getting lost, escaping into the imagination and emotion of the song, with room for thoughts and human interaction built into the mix. Was so fucken great.
It’s no wonder albums sales have crashed and burned. In the race to be the loudest, the world’s forgotten the magic formula.
I love learning about the phenomenon of the loudness wars, it ruined a lot of albums in my opinion! I end up going to YouTube unsung heroes who fix dynamics on songs. Thanks for posting! Some interesting stuff here :)
You're welcome.
It wasn’t so much that it was loud, it’s that they compressed the hell out of it to the point where it was clipping.
4 score and 7 years ago type of vibe
I’m guessing you may be in the business. I started in the music business in the early 90s and then became a re-recording mixer for 30 years. I loved your post. You nailed the NS10s and the state of loudness, even with LUFS now involved.
I would love to know if your idea would work, but for the streaming services to guess which songs need that EQ may be tough. Better yet of course would be for albums to be mixed and/or mastered this way to begin with. And honestly, maybe forget LUFS all together and use a standard based on vocal/midrange level instead.
I understand that artists are only concerned with how their album plays from beginning to end and want that creative freedom. We all shuffle music though, and the perceived level differences are extremely annoying. Often it now feels like the "softer" songs are louder than the "heavy" songs. In fact, I just had a Metallica song go into a soft vocal and acoustic guitar song, which I had to turn down because of how "loud" I perceived it compared to Metallica.
An alternative though could be a new version of something like Sound Check on Apple Music or Spotify that could basically set levels per song based on vocals/midrange, maybe with the option to had a corrective EQ added. As it is now, systems like Apple Music’s Sound Check is poorly designed to mitigate the issue, maybe because it's strictly looking at LUFS. In fact, here’s a weird one. If you have Sound Check off and have two rock based tracks, one in stereo and one in Spatial Audio, the Spatial Audio track is too low. Turn Sound Check on though, and now the Spatial Audio track is too loud. It can't even get that right. And forget about a Playlist full of different genres, it's just painful.
I know my rant got a little off topic, talking strictly about perceived level and not specifically EQ, but I hear what you're saying... loud and clear.
Edits: Grammar
Thanks for that reply. It's definitely a tough nut to crack. And, I'm more of a very well educated consumer than an industry guy. I know what I like and I kind of know how to get it.
Maybe some machine learning based software (AI) could be the answer. So that a track with just acoustic guitar and vocals is treated differently to an EDM track, to a Metal track, etc,,, I've got a plugin that can tell the difference between different styles kind of accurately. If some real time and money was spent something pretty comprehensive could be created IMO.
And, the part of the spectrum that is focused on is important. I don't quite have my head around which frequencies are the most important for perceived loudness, as far as building a streaming filter is concerned. I'd love it if the big dogs of the Audio Engineering world did some testing to find the sweet spot, and put together a system for the big Streaming sites to use. Probably the balance between 1.5k and 3k if I had to guess.
Also, getting the word out that listening to music shouldn't feel the same as listening to someone talking. It should feel more like listening to nature.
Then I can get back to kicking back and enjoying some cool fucken tunes again.
I'm not sure if this applies to mixing movies or not tho. If you've got humans talking on a screen in front of you it might be better to have the 1.5k standing out of the mix. I'd guess that moving in and out of this range would be the way. But like I say, I'm not an expert.
Amen to that, man. And mixing sound to picture has its own issues these days too for sure. Hell, it seems most people need closed captioning on nowadays. I have my own thoughts on that too of course, but I won't muddy the thread with that haha.
If you were to make a post about that somewhere else on Reddit I'd love to check it out.
Ngl, I didn't read all this.
All I know is I could hear the clipping on my day one Death Magnetic cd purchase. When I finally heard that they put a better version on Apple and their website digitally, I immediately cashed in my free month trial of Apple music to check it out.
Sounds a lot better when I can hear it. The overall sound mix seemed to be lowered and it was audibly distracting when trying to increase volume and it was already maxxed out.
So I'm still waiting on a decent mix of Death Magnetic.
It would easily be my favorite album if the mixing was better. People complain about the snare on St. Anger, but atleast it fits with the tone of the album. On Magnetic though, the snare is so much more noticeable and distracting, especially on Day That Never Comes. The album could very easily be right up there with the early albums if it wasn't for the mixing
Ughh you've ruined day the never comes for me because while I always knew something was off about the snare you've just made me relize what it is and now it will be the focus everytime I hear it haha.
I'm sorry, but others will know my pain! It's a great song but damn does the mixing suck
The original mix without the excessive limiting is the one I'm interested in hearing. That's the only one that captures the album properly as it was done at the same time.
The forced static on the last "this I swear" feels like a Fischer-Price recording set.
I absolutely agree. Especially given the high end production value of other albums...DM is just physically painful to listen to in its original form but the songs are bangers.
Try the Moderus version, made from the Guitar Hero stems.
Using Iron Maiden to illustrate the Loudness war throughout the years. By Dance of Death it's unbearable to me.
The loudness war physically hurts my ears and I hate it. The compression kills me. I can listen to Ride the Lightning on 10 but I can't listen to 72 Seasons on 4. They might be good but I can't tell without causing myself actual pain.
There's oodles of information on the origin of the loudness wars in the music industry - why it was created, why it exists, and the damage it's done to the music industry, the bands creating music, and the listeners who listen to and buy music. The answers and solutions are beyond the scope of this post but can be found by searching Google which will bring up tons of links to educate anyone interested.
Second paragraph gave me a headache. Why do you write like you're trying to meet a word count?
Or maybe I should say:
Is there a particular reason that you, the writer of this piece, have used such excessively bloated language while changing tenses multiple times within the same sentence, while forming giant run-on sentences separated only by a comma, almost as if you're a student who has to turn in an essay by midnight and only just started to write it?
hahaha.
Sorry. I couldn't think of any other way to put it.
Sir this is a Wendy’s
(try this rant in an audio engineering sub)
Not a bad idea.
NS10s do not sound great. All midrange. But that is where the most important frequencies are for mixing. If you get the midrange right, a mix will generally sound good.
The real reason they were popular is because of their transient response, but they were also overhyped and just became a trendy thing to use, not because they are great, but because everyone loves a bandwagon. Ns10s were relatively cheap and you could bring them into studios so you didn't have to rely on whatever speakers they had. Familiarity with a sound system is important, and many studios having relatively shitty monitors installed for whatever reasons...
At the end of the day, tons of great mixes have been made with no one listening to them through ns10s, and what's far more important is to have a reasonably well tuned environment and lots of experience listening critically on a decent speaker system in that environment. It's all about having the knowledge and confidence to know how what you are hearing will translate to other environments. You can mix on practically anything and anywhere if you spend the time to learn the space and the sound system.
You are wrong about ambient sound and lufs, that's not really how it works - ambience generally adds density and density adds loudness. After all, silence inevitably has a lower luf reading than a reverb tail. But you are right that lufs has frequency weighting and that some modern mixes aim to maximise lufs leading to overhyped frequencies in those where our hearing is most sensitive.
Producers and mixers aren't necessarily maximising their mixers loudness for streaming normalisation in the way you say. Many modern mixes are a lot louder than what spotify et al normalise too. And the reason they have such loud mixes is an aesthetic choice. One I don't like, but one that is commonly made.
They are making that aesthetic choice in spite of normalisation, and would make similar (probably worse) choices if normalisation wasn't common and we were back in the peak loudness wars....
Your solution just doesn't make any sense to me. An ns10 filter would make lufs less responsive to low frequency content and thus encourage mixes with more congested midranges. At best you'd be pushing focus slightly away from the 1.5k range and more into the 500-1k and 2-4k range, but our hearing is super sensitive to these ranges too...
The transient booster is the weirdest thing of all to add, I'm not sure what you'd hope that would change, except to perhaps encourage things to be less dynamic and closer to a wall of coloured noise.
I also fundamentally disagree with your analysis of mixes from the 80s vs now - trends have led modern mixes to have way more low frequency content than in the past. And plenty of modern mixes are completely washed in reverb and other ambient effects - it's always just genre dependent. And this 'escaping into the imagination and emotion' of the song is just absurd hyperbole.
Tying lufs to album sales is the most nonsensical part of all - that's pretty much entirely due to streaming and data sharing more broadly.
I'm gonna need a tl;dr on this my man, sorry but it's just too much on a subject I don't follow
People want their streamed music to be all the same volume because it’s annoying to have a song be suddenly loud or quiet. At the same time, we naturally perceive ’louder’ music as ‘better’.
Streaming services have figured out how to make all songs the same volume. In response, the song mixers have adjusted the mixes to maximize what we perceive as ‘loud’, which is the same spectrum as conversation - songs with more complex sound gets perceived as ‘lesser’ by comparison and aren’t as likely to become hits.
So music has gotten objectively worse, ‘solving’ the problem of volume variation creates a new problem.
Thank you. That's a great summary.
Basically, the solution to the Death Magnetic loudness problem was half baked and has created a completely new problem which in my opinion is worse. It saved our ear drums, but is now hurting our sanity.
I'm not sure it can be explained any other way. Sorry about that.