Back in late March I was the unexpected recipient of a great April Fool’s joke by Scott Dorsey of Recording Magazine. I was so fooled by the prank that I even posted a blog about it (Louder is not Better). Now, granted that if I had read the article on April 1st I probably would’ve picked up on the gag, but I got the magazine around March 27th.
So, my hats off to Mr. Dorsey for a very well played April fools joke and my apologies if I made any offending comments. But I must admit that I still believe that there are loads of people in the music industry that think that over-compression and mastering albums so loud that it removes all sense of dynamics is a good thing. I would even think that Mr. Dorsey’s idea for his April Fools prank may have come from the fact of how ridiculous the practice is.
Check out this informative website by CD Mastering Services which shows examples of how mastering levels have been increasing since the late 80’s. In the first screenshot you have a picture of the audio frequency of Bryan Adam’s song “Cuts like a knife from his 1983 breakthrough CD.
At that time mastering houses were just starting to do CD’s and kept levels at a respectable -2.52db. One of the things that engineers and audio enthusiasts loved about CD’s at the time when they first came out was the ability to have a wide dynamic range while keeping surface noise down.
Eventually some labels (and engineers) began noticing that some of the dynamic range could be expendable in return for a louder master. However those sacrifices of dynamic range began to take a back seat to louder albums and by the early 90’s more labels began to insist on louder mastered albums as shown on the CD Mastering Services screenshot of Amy Grant’s CD “Heart in Motion”.
By 2000 all respect or care for dynamic range had gone out the window.
Today we add the fact that most songs are listened to on small cheap ear-buds and compressed mp3’s and you find an entire generation absolutely unaware of what dynamic ranges even sounds like.
So yes, I did get punk’d on April fool’s day with the article, but I think that even Mr. Dorsey might agree with me that it’s the general public that’s getting shafted by not getting the best possible product for their money.
