Everything Louder Than Everything Else - Dynamic Range Mastering In 2011

In 2006 I wrote an article for Stylus Magazine about dynamic range compression, a technique applied to music in order to make it louder, and thus, the desperate hope goes, more noticable. It got a lot of attention; as well as being seemingly the first consumer-led piece about dynamic range compression (engineers and techies have been moaning about it for years) it was just about the most-read thing Stylus ever published (beyond end-of-year lists). Numerous musicians, producers, and record company people got in touch with me to say ‘thank you’ for writing it, at least one band was explicitly influenced by it when recording their next album, and Robert Christgau, self-ordained dean of American rock critics, chose to include it when compiling the 2007 Da Capo Best Music Writing anthology.
Five years on though, if I’m honest, I feel like that original article was far too long, repetitive, and rambling, and so I’ve decided to “remaster” it, as it were, trim it, shorten it, update it for 2011, and try and hammer the message home again. Dynamic range compression hasn’t gone away, and while there are plenty of records out there that still sound great, so much of the musical product we have foisted upon is so sonically subpar that people who express surprise at the continuing collapse of the record industry perpetually amaze me. So here goes.
Several months on from its release, and there are plenty of things I find unpleasant about Kanye West’s much lauded My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: the overlong songs and overstuffed arrangements; Chris Rock’s not-offensive-enough-to-be-funny monologue about “re-upholstering” a woman’s sexual organs; the tedious, prog-like 4-minute vocoder “solo”. Not to mention Kanye’s perpetual, “Oh woe is me, I’m a poor rich man who does bad things” persona. But these all pale into insignificance next to the album’s most obnoxious feature: its horrific, distorted volume.
Because My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is loud. Really loud. If you open up an MP3 of one of its songs in an audio-editing program like Audacity, the waveform, a visual representation of the sound, looks like a brick. In fact, let me do it for you: this is 'Monster', the awesome, Nicki Minaj-starring peak of the album:

That blue space represents the sound you hear when you play the song – the vocals, beats, everything else; when it reaches the top and bottom of the grey bar it’s in that means it’s at maximum volume. The light grey space around the blue (you might have to squint; there’s not a lot of it to see) indicates points in the song where it’s not at maximum volume. As you can see, 'Monster' is at maximum volume for pretty much its entire length.
Once you’re at maximum volume, of course, there’s nowhere else for sound to go except “into the red”, which means distortion. With analogue distortion, this translates as a warm buzz that’s long been the sound of overdriven rock music. Digital distortion, unfortunately, is a very different sound; it’s usually described as “clipping” because the top of the waveform is literally flattened, as if someone had clipped the edges off with scissors.
What this brick-like waveform translates to when you actually play 'Monster' through a pair of speakers is a relentless assault where instruments and voices lack definition and start to blur together, where there’s no room for the music to breathe, no chance of a dramatic shift in volume as you surge into a chorus (remember The Pixies?), and where sound pushes into digital distortion when it tries to get any louder, because it simply has nowhere else to go.
Which may well have been Kanye’s intention, but when you consider that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is well over an hour long, and maintains this loud, blurred approach for its entire length, it becomes difficult to listen to without your attention wandering. Possibly to the thought of where there might be some aspirin.
This extreme loudness isn’t at all uncommon; in fact it’s an epidemic, and has been for some time. Loudness is measured in decibels RMS; in 1987, Guns n’Roses’ debut album Appetite For Destruction was considered loud, and averaged -15dB RMS volume, meaning the average volume was 15 decibels below what’s referred to as “digital zero”, the absolute maximum loudness that can be achieved.
By 1994 the average loudness for a rock record was -12dB. Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory in 1995 hit an extraordinary -8dB, meaning it seems more than twice as loud as Appetite for Destruction if they’re played with the volume dial in the same position. The 1997 remaster of The Stooges’ Raw Power reaches an unbelievable -4dB (meaning the sound barely ever dips below “digital zero”, and therefore the threat of digital clipping and distortion), making it supposedly the loudest rock record ever...

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Nick Southall @'The Quietus'