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The Loudness War

Matt Mayfield Music · 2.7M views · 2006-10-07 · 1:54

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Overview

A two-minute demonstration of the loudness war, showing how heavy dynamic range compression in CD mastering makes music louder while degrading sound quality. It uses audio examples so you can hear the distortion.

On Hacker News

HN keeps linking it as the shortest clear explanation of over-compression and brickwalled mastering.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2009–2025

Topics

Audio & video engineeringInformation theory & signal processing
Search by tags
loudness wardynamic rangecompressioncdmastering

What people said

morsch · 2016-05 · Recommendation

Your post led me down the rabbit hole of over-compression, not for the first time, and I ended up at this video which gave a very succinct answer to my question of: "Okay, I realize that music is getting compressed, but what are we losing?" [VIDEO] Via a nice article with analysis: [LINK]

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visakanv · 2015-04 · Recommendation

The same reason why music on the radio is so dang loud– excessive compression. See: The Loudness War (just 1:54 mins long): [VIDEO]

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9oliYQjP · 2009-04 · Recommendation

I think one of the reasons that those people who prefer vinyl over digital do so, is that the recordings on vinyl are mastered with different qualities in mind than their digital counterparts. There's a YouTube video floating around called The Loudness War ( [VIDEO] ) that describes what I'm talking about. I distinctly remember albums on audio CDs sounding better to me (great clarity, vibrancy, etc.) back in the early 1990s. Then, somewhere toward the end of the 1990s, CDs just started to sound worse. I blame the trend described in that video. I suspect that vinyl recordings do not suffer from this same tendency toward loudness in the audio mastering process, and that is why you have audiophiles insisting that vinyl sounds better than digital.

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Sources

Video by Matt Mayfield Music, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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