Why the Sound of Music Sucks Today – Part 1

We’d like to welcome Aaron Gant as our very first Guest Geek on GeekInspired.com. Aaron is a professional recording engineer and music producer.

Anyone over the age of 30 has been thinking the same thing: Why does this new CD sound like crap when my old copy of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” still sounds great? Shouldn’t new music sound better?

There are many reasons for the change in audio quality over the last few years but I’ve got a few of my favorites I’ve been wanting to vent about for awhile now.

“Louder is Better” – The powers that run the music business, and generally ignorant people everywhere, think that a loud song sounds better than a soft song.

If you’re old enough to actually have owned a real stereo system then you might remember turning up the LOW and HIGH (or Bass and Treble if you could afford that kind of thing) knobs to the delight of your little speakers as you made it “sound better”. Those of us with jobs would spend even more money on a Graphic EQ that allowed us more control only to end up with the classic EQ “smiley face” pattern boosting the highs and lows to the same effect. It sounded better to us and we felt good about it knowing that our hours of mowing lawns had bettered our lives in such a meaningful way.

The Fletcher-Munson curve tells us that as the volume of what we hear increases so does our perception of the low and high frequencies. Therefore, when played back to back and with no adjustment to the volume controls, the louder of two songs will have more perceived high and low frequencies and thus “sound better” to our inner audio geek.

If I ran a record label, and I wanted the music we released to sound better than my competition, then I might tell the producers that I want the music mixes to be louder than others. Those producers (who, let’s be honest, couldn’t make it as artists themselves) might then instruct the engineers to make it louder. Those engineers (who, let’s be honest, haven’t seen the sun or a woman in years) will bitch and complain and try to explain but in the end will do what they’re told because they like their jobs and really don’t want to go back to mowing lawns.

So how can an engineer make the music louder when the maximum audio limits are set by the format on which it is recorded?

Thus it begins . . . .THE LOUDNESS WARS!!!!!

Who can make their music the loudest? Who can push the limits on the radio? Then along comes the CD, and later the MP3, and everything gets complicated.

(NEXT TIME – Pushing the limits! or How I Spent My Summer With Bleeding Ears.)