The Past and Future of the Loudness War

If you’ve lurked around pro audio, production, or audiophile communities long enough, you’ve certainly encountered a reference to the “Loudness War.”

What is referenced here is the race for music producers to make their new song louder than those that came before – a point addressed in the mastering phase of production.

In keeping with last week’s topic, let’s dive into the dark side of mastering – the Loudness War. But first…

What Is Loudness?

Merriam-Webster defines loudness as the attribute of a sound that determines the magnitude of the auditory sensation produced and that primarily depends on the amplitude of the sound wave involved.

That’s a pretty good definition, and it hints at a key component of what loudness actually is. It is the magnitude of a sensation – in other words, loudness is a perception. And as a perception, loudness is also relative, meaning that it has historically been defined in relation to other sounds. Sure, a muscle car is loud, but if you’re a baggage handler on a tarmac, it really isn’t so loud compared to a jet engines.

The Legend of the Jukebox

It’s this relative perception of loudness that is the root of the Loudness War of the turn of the century. As the story goes, back in the fifties, it was noticed that louder songs got more plays at the jukebox. Consequently, music publishers pushed for louder masters in hopes of a more popular record.

Fortunately for the masses, music mastered for a vinyl record can only get so loud. Any louder and the record would be unplayable, due to space limitations within their grooves. And then came the Compact Disc…

The CD was the first medium of the digital age, and with that, the old physical limitations of the vinyl record disappeared. This was the beginning of the Loudness War as we know it.

New Toys, Same Old Boys

With the physical limitations posed by vinyl removed, record producers were free to create louder masters. The old mindset of “louder is better” remained the axiom in the budding digital era, and slowly but surely, newer music was getting louder.

Hugh Robjohns wrote a terrific article for Sound on Sound magazine in which he delineated two paradigms of loudness. The first is the one with which we are all familiar – if you want the music louder, turn the volume up. Simple enough.

The second paradigm is an artificial loudness achieved by compressing and limiting the sound in the mastering stage. If you raise the quieter sounds whilst limiting the louder sounds, you create a louder master.

Of course, this type of artificial loudness cannot be achieved without sacrificing dynamic range – and therein lies the problem.

A Cold War

The jump to the extreme masters of the late 2000’s and beyond did not happen over night. They happened in tiny increments over the course of thirty-odd years – when the vinyl barrier was lifted at the onset of the digital era.

Take a look at this waveform comparison of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.” The bottom waveform is a 2011 vinyl remaster. The top is a 2015 CD remaster:

Notice the severe bloating of the CD version when compared to the vinyl remastered version. It didn’t make it any better, it only made it louder and less dynamic. This is a great example of what happened to music when digital media was introduced. It’s also a tangible example of why so many audiophiles say vinyl just sounds better — because the dynamics haven’t been completely squeezed out.

This next graphic illustrates the loss of dynamics and increasing loudness of ABBA’s song, Super Trouper over the course of several remastered versions released over the years.

It’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it?

Well, my friends, it gets much worse. Enter Sandma– I mean, Metallica.

Shots Fired!

It’s largely agreed that the Loudness War came to a head in 2008, when Metallica released their infamous Death Magnetic album. Actually, there were two versions – one was the commercial album, and the other was a version released for Guitar Hero 3.

I won’t say a word. Watch this video:

Ouch.

Death Magnetic is regarded as one of the loudest albums – if not the loudest album – ever produced. And it sounds like garbage. It sounds so bad that fans actually circulated a petition for the album to be re-done. It accrued around 20,000 signatures.

In another article published in Sound on Sound, Emmanuel Deruty brilliantly explains why such a modern mastering approach destroyed Metallica’s album. It comes down to this — Metallica’s music already has a small dynamic range and stable level throughout. Such is the nature of their genre. The overly-aggressive mastering approach applied to their commercial release removed what little dynamic range remained and drove the low-variable RMS of the track right up against the 0dB mark. The upshot being that the album is literally exhausting to hear.

But what sealed this album’s fate is the Guitar Hero 3 version, which was sanely mastered and sounded great. So when fans heard the album proper, there was a distinct this is not what it’s supposed to sound like moment. The masses finally had a point of comparison to see the destructive effects of the Loudness War that had been slowly escalating since the 1980’s.

A Truce

A few years after the Death Magnetic debacle, Congress passed the CALM Act of 2012, which directed the FCC to regulate the loudness of commercials to match the loudness of the programs they accompany. While not directly related to the music industry, this directive employed algorithms developed specifically to quantify loudness – a quantification that did not exist before. The first ever units of loudness had come into being. First called LKFS (Loudness, K-weighted, Relative to Full-Scale), and later changed to LUFS (Loudness Unit Relative to Full Scale) in order to better conform to standard scientific nomenclature, this new unit of measure provided broadcasters and distributors a means of regulating the loudness of the media they play.

Originally developed to combat unbearably loud commercials, the standardization practice has since trickled down to online media streaming platforms, which adopted the new loudness units in an effort to normalize the loudness of the music available on their platforms. Seeing that such a vast portion of music is consumed via these streaming platforms, music producers are now adopting these loudness standards in order to optimize their new masters for these platforms – effectively ending the Loudness War and returning dynamic range to the music they produce. It is no longer useful to push for loudness with brick-wall limiting because under the new standardization of loudness, such a practice yields a quieter track when streamed on a loudness-normalized platform.

Sweet victory!

A New War on the Horizon?

Since the implementation of loudness-standardization in broadcast and streaming, platforms have put forth loudness recommendations. They don’t vary drastically, but look at the table below and notice the differences among some of the major streaming platforms in relation the recommended standard of -16 LUFS and -1dB peak:

Platform	Max Loudness	Max Peak
AES Recommended Standard	-16 LUFS	-1dB
Spotify	-14 LUFS	-1dB
Spotify (Loud)	-11 LUFS	-1dB
Apple Music	-16 (+/-1) LUFS	-2dB
Amazon Music	-14 LUFS	-1dB
Tidal	-14 LUFS	-1dB
YouTube	-14 LUFS	-1dB

Of all these major platforms, only one (Apple Music) has actually adopted the recommended standard of -16 LUFS. Everyone else seems to be going with -14 LUFS, which is just a tad louder. Okay, fine. So everyone seems to be going with a tad louder. But Spotify offers a “loud” option.

This is where it seems to be getting slippery. What if everyone else adopts a “loud” version? Then what if someone adopts the “loud” option as its own baseline standard?

Is this the Second Great Loudness War looming on the horizon? One of nudging target loudness ever upward, one LUFS at a time?

Only time will tell.

-Chris Lazaga
AudioMunk