Criticism
This practice has been condemned by several recording industry professionals including Alan Parsons, Geoff Emerick (noted for his work with The Beatles from Revolver to Abbey Road), and mastering engineers Doug Sax, Steve Hoffman, and many others, including music audiophiles, hi-fi enthusiasts, and fans. Musician Bob Dylan has also condemned the practice, saying: "You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like—static." Nonetheless, the compact disc editions of Dylan's more recent albums Modern Times and Together Through Life are examples of heavy dynamic range compression.
When music is broadcast over radio, the station applies its own signal processing, further reducing the dynamic range of the material to closely match levels of absolute amplitude, regardless of the original recording's loudness.
Opponents have also called for immediate changes in the music industry regarding the level of loudness. In August 2006, the vice-president of A&R for One Haven Music, a Sony Music company, in an open letter decrying the loudness war, claimed that mastering engineers are being forced against their will or are preemptively making releases louder in order to get the attention of industry heads. Some bands are being petitioned by the public to re-release their music with less distortion.
The nonprofit organization Turn Me Up! was created by Charles Dye, John Ralston and Allen Wagner to certify albums that contain a suitable level of dynamic range and encourage the sale of quieter records by placing a "Turn Me Up!" sticker on albums that have a larger dynamic range. The group has not yet arrived at an objective method for determining what will be certified.
Hearing experts, such as a hearing researcher at House Ear Institute in Los Angeles, are also concerned that the loudness of new albums could possibly harm listeners' hearing, particularly that of children.
A 2-minute YouTube video addressing this issue by audio engineer Matt Mayfield has been referenced by The Wall Street Journal and The Chicago Tribune. Pro Sound Web quoted Mayfield: "When there is no quiet, there can be no loud."
The book Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music (Faber, 2009), by Greg Milner presents the Loudness war in radio and music production as a central theme. The book Mastering Audio: The Art and the Science (2nd Edition, Focal Press, 2007), by Bob Katz, includes a chapter about the origins of the loudness war and another suggesting methods of combatting the war, based on Katz's presentation at the 107th Audio Engineering Convention (1999) and his Audio Engineering Society Journal publication (2000).
Read more about this topic: Loudness War
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive.”
—Laurence Steinberg (20th century)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)