[MLA] Loudness War in New York Times

[Ian Shepherd]

Great story, thanks for sharing, Eelco !

Kevin, I’m somewhere in the middle of the two extremes described by Bob K & Bob L. In the last few years I’ve had no requests to master anything any louder than I was comfortable with, and a couple of times I’ve even been asked to make things more dynamic !

But, like Bob K I do next to no major label work, any more - and my “brand” is very strongly associated with dynamics, so I think my client base is skewed heavily away from people who want things super-loud. I’ve had several people come to me specifically because they had their music mastered by a “big name” studios, unnecessarily loud, and they’ve been delighted by my more dynamic versions. 

Overall I’d say things seem more polarised to me - some people are moving to more sane levels, others are pushing even harder towards the loud extremes.

I’ve also had some criticism from established engineers for whom “loud” is an important part of that they offer, saying that I don’t understand the commercial pressures etc, and that certain genres “need” a certain sound. Of course I do understand this, I’ve heard it from many engineers, not just Bob - also people tell me the artists sometimes choose the crushed, distorted sound even when they hear it level-matched - because it fits with what they’ve been listening to :-/

On the plus side, I think it’s still very early days in all this, even though it seems like forever to all of us. Only in the last year or two have I seen people discussing normalisation in mainstream audio forums - and these are still the “bleeding edge” of people who are interested in the technical details and what sounds best. 

It is being discussed all the time now though, and since I launched the Loudness Penalty <http://www.loudnesspenalty.com/> site with MeterPlugs I’ve seen it mentioned and recommended more and more - we’ve had push-back over the deliberately provocative name, but also many messages from people saying Thank You, and that it’s opened their eyes or enabled them to persuade clients, just like the email paragraph in Eelco’s message. 

My conclusion: the current situation is often depressing, especially listening to mainstream major label releases, but I’m still optimistic - largely because of the impact normalization is starting to have.

Cheers !

Ian


PS. This discussion prompted me to check - the petition <https://www.change.org/p/music-streaming-services-bring-peace-to-the-loudness-war> that Bob, Eelco, Matt Mayfield and I set up is almost at 10,000 signatures, now - that seems like something worth shouting (quietly) about on Dynamic Range Day this year !




> On 11 Feb 2019, at 20:54, Kevin Gross <kevin.gross at avanw.com> wrote:
> 
> That's an encouraging story, Eelco.
> 
> Sounds like we're getting significantly different outcomes in different areas of audio.
> 
> I guess it was naive to hope that normalization would fix everything because radio has been normalized all along and yet, here we are.
> 
> Kevin Gross - AVA Networks

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