[SteveR]

That's a very good article. It really shows how there is a constant huge struggle between clients, engineers, and labels as to 'what sounds good.' The engineers know exactly what technically is correct (for those engineers that know what they are doing), the clients don't usually know or care for that matter and just want things like "I want it louder" or "I want my voice to sound like so and so's voice" and all other unhelpful comments. The labels never really know what the public wants. So what they do is push some outdated over played ideal out to the masses. Look at it like this, bands come out that are unique and sell records, like Pearl Jam. What happens for the next 15 years? The labels release cds with 8 trillion Eddie Vedders singing on them. Or Kurt Cobain's, or Maynerd's, etc. They push something so hard that the public gets sick of it. The labels turn people off from music in some ways. What sucks and often happens is you get a new young band with crazy talent and a fresh contract, and the label assigns some idiot corporate producer to come in and transform the band into some cookie cutter BS and the cd comes out and the label wonders why it doesnt sell like the Spice Girls. The industry really is a bunch of over paid insecure clueless childish adults for the most part. The hand-holding involved should make me qualified to run a pre-school.

This one paragraph is incorrect though:

"Music released today typically has a dynamic range only a fourth to an eighth as wide as that of the 1990s. That means if you play a newly released CD right after one that's 15 years old, leaving the volume knob untouched, the new one is likely to sound four to eight times as loud. Many who've followed the controversy say "Death Magnetic" has one of the narrowest dynamic ranges ever on an album."

Perceptual loudness is measured in dbu, or decibels-unterminated, and is the professional reference and measurement for perceptual sound levels while the signal is still inside a system. Perceptual loudness is measured in human hearing as a +/- 3db change being a perceivable change in volume to the average listener, and a +/- 10db change is an increase/decrease in sound by a factor of 2, or twice/half the volume. When it says that "likely to sound four to eight times as loud", that's an increase of 40-80db, which is not possible. dbu is also not measured by percentages either. Say your dynamic range is 50db. A 25% decrease in dynamic range is 12.5db, not 40. The dynamic range is certainly smaller and it very well could be an eighth to a fourth as wide, but it's not going to sound four to eight times as loud solely based on dynamic range adjustments. There is a lot more technology available today than 30 years ago that allow you to adjust perceptual loudness without affecting dbm- or the actual loudness as a measurable electrical signal in a system referenced to 1 milliwatt across a 600 ohm load. There are also a lot of studio tricks to do the same using hardware instead of software. The best way is an old way from the early days of recording that I don't think anybody even knows about anymore.

I was actually going to post in this thread today with some new info I got from some friends last night. I was talking to a few people about what's going on in the industry and I heard that the record companies have big plans. There was about ten years ago a huge plan to introduce the next step in music distribution to the masses that would dramatically increase the crap quality of cds (and replace them). It was a great idea and I was in on it from the start and just as it was coming out in the pro world, napster happened. With this new idea in the public that music should be free and screw paying for music etc., I heard that the industry canceled the program. The mindset is that if people are going to steal it, screw giving them tens of millions of dollars worth of R&D in a new high quality product, let them deal with crap quality mp3s. So because of all these selfish assclowns, we won't be getting 96Khz, 24 bit, streaming uncompressed 5.1 surround music to your local music store. Thanks, ****heads.