Ian Lewis' Blog

I recently saw an interesting article on the "Loudness War". Basically it's a sort of loudness arms race between competing music labels and radio stations to increase the loudness of recordings so they stand out. Wikipedia has an extensive article on the subject.

The loudness of the entire recording is increased, but the maximum volume of a particular part of a CD/Vinyl recording is fixed so what results is that any sound dynamics are lost. The louds are loud, and the soft parts are loud.

When I saw this video, I thought this is exactly what I felt was missing from the more recent Rush recordings that the previous ones had, sound wise. It was just a feeling as I was listening to the music, so I assumed it was basically overprocessing with expensive equipment. It's nice to see it codified in the nice, simple to understand example above.