RECORDING INSDUSTRY DESTROYING THE SOUND OF MUSIC

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ROBERT LEVINE, ROLLING STONE - David Bendeth, a producer who works with
rock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he
makes are often played through tiny computer speakers by fans who are
busy surfing the Internet. So he's not surprised when record labels ask
the mastering engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels
so high that even the soft parts sound loud.

Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology
has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered - almost
always for the worse. "They make it loud to get [listeners'] attention,"
Bendeth says. Engineers do that by applying dynamic range compression,
which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a
song. Like many of his peers, Bendeth believes that relying too much on
this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power
and leave listeners with what engineers call ear fatigue. "I think most
everything is mastered a little too loud," Bendeth says. "The industry
decided that it's a volume contest."

Producers and engineers call this "the loudness war," and it has changed
the way almost every new pop and rock album sounds. But volume isn't the
only issue. Computer programs like Pro Tools, which let audio engineers
manipulate sound the way a word processor edits text, make musicians
sound unnaturally perfect. And today's listeners consume an increasing
amount of music on MP3, which eliminates much of the data from the
original CD file and can leave music sounding tinny or hollow. "With all
the technical innovation, music sounds worse," says Steely Dan's Donald
Fagen, who has made what are considered some of the best-sounding
records of all time. "God is in the details. But there are no details
anymore.". . .

It's the same technique used to make television commercials stand out
from shows. And it does grab listeners' attention - but at a price. Last
year, Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone that modern albums "have sound all
over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just
like - static."

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17777619/the_death_of_high_fidelity/print


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