Ron’s Blog

Can a Metallica album be too loud?
The very thought might seem heretical to fans of the legendary metal band, which has been splitting eardrums with unrivaled power since the early 1980s. But even though Metallica’s ninth studio release, “Death Magnetic,” is No. 1 on the album chart, with 827,000 copies sold in two weeks, some fans are bitterly disappointed: not by the songs or the performance, but the volume. It’s so loud, they say, you can’t hear the details of the music. “Death Magnetic” is a flashpoint in a long-running music-industry fight. Over the years, rock and pop artists have increasingly sought to make their recordings sound louder to stand out on the radio, jukeboxes and, especially, iPods.
Audiophiles, recording professionals and some ordinary fans say the extra sonic wallop comes at a steep price. To make recorded music seem louder, engineers must reduce the “dynamic range,” minimizing the difference between the soft and loud parts and creating a tidal wave of aural blandness. “When there’s no quiet, there can be no loud,” said Matt Mayfield, a Minnesota electronic-music teacher, in a YouTube video that sketched out the battle lines of the loudness war. A recording’s dynamic range can be measured by calculating the variation between its average sound level and its maximum, and can be visually expressed through wave forms. Louder recordings, with higher average sound levels, leave less room for such variation than quieter ones. Some fans are complaining that “Death Magnetic” has a thin, brittle sound that’s the result of the band’s attempts in the studio to make it as loud as possible. “Sonically it is barely listenable,” reads one fan’s online critique. Thousands have signed an online petition urging the band to re-mix the album and release it again.
Metallica and the album’s producer, Rick Rubin, declined to comment. Cliff Burnstein, Metallica’s co-manager, says the complainers are a tiny minority. He says 98% of listeners are “overwhelmingly positive,” adding: “There’s something exciting about the sound of this record that people are responding to”. But the critics have inadvertently recruited a key witness: Ted Jensen, the album’s “mastering engineer,” the person responsible for the sonic tweaks that translate music made in a studio into a product for mass duplication and playback by consumers. Responding to a Metallica fan’s email about loudness, Mr. Jensen sent a sympathetic reply that concluded: “Believe me, I’m not proud to be associated with this one.” The battle has roots in the era before compact discs. With vinyl records, “it was impossible to make loud past a certain point,” says Bob Ludwig, a veteran mastering engineer. But digital technology made it possible to squeeze all of the sound into a narrow, high-volume range. In addition, music now is often optimized for play on the relatively low-fidelity earbuds for iPods, reducing incentives to offer a broad dynamic range. The loudness war began heating up around the time CDs gained popularity, in the early 1980s. Guns N’ Roses’ “Appetite for Destruction” upped the ante in 1987, as did Metallica’s 1991 “Black Album” and then the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication” in 1999. Music released today typically has a dynamic range only a fourth to an eighth as wide as that of the 1990s. That means if you play a newly released CD right after one that’s 15 years old, leaving the volume knob untouched, the new one is likely to sound four to eight times as loud. Many who’ve followed the controversy say “Death Magnetic” has one of the narrowest dynamic ranges ever on an album. Sound engineers say artists who insist on loudness paradoxically give people less to hear, because they end up wiping away nuances and details. Everything from a gently strummed guitar to a pounding snare drum is equally loud, leading to what some call “ear fatigue.” If the listener turns down the volume knob, the music loses even more of its punch. But many musicians, producers and record-company executives “think that having a louder record is going to translate into greater sales,” says Chris Athens, Mr. Jensen’s business partner and a fellow engineer. As for the deafening “Death Magnetic,” it struck one fan as fitting for these tumultuous times, thanks to songs like “Broken, Beat and Scarred” and “All Nightmare Long,” says Metallica’s co-manager, Mr. Burnstein. He says an investment banker emailed to say that “the album and its song titles have just become the soundtrack of the Wall Street crash of 2008.”

Mixes have definitely gotten louder in recent years. Of course there is no way that digital audio can go higher in level than full scale (0 dBFS), but the closer and more often a signal approaches 0 dBFS, then the louder it will sound. The tools for this are compression, limiting, and very careful watchful eyes and ears for clipping. The reason why mixes have gotten louder is because the equipment and software to make them so has become more common and more affordable, and more people know about it. The second is that mixes compete with each other for loudness. Take radio for example. Within the terms of a radio broadcaster’s license to transmit, they have to agree to a certain transmission power level. There is nothing that can be done at the radio station to make a signal any higher in level. This is the radio station’s equivalent of 0dBFS. But if mixes can be made subjectively louder in the studio, it follows that whoever’s mix is subjectively the loudest will sound loudest on air. Other mixes will be quieter in comparison. And loudness gets attention. The same applies in clubs. The level of a PA system is set to comply with the limits of the equipment, and often decibel limits applied by law or property rental agreements. So if a mix can sound subjectively louder within the same peak levels, it will be at an advantage compared to mixes that are not subjectively so loud. But the downside to this is that all the processes that make a mix loud downgrade the audio quality. So if you don’t want to listen so loud, it won’t sound so good. There is no area where this is more significant than music for TV and film use. If I am asked to ‘master’ your mixes and ‘optimize’ them for loudness, then you are damaging your audio quality to no good purpose. Your music is probably only going to be background anyway. For a title theme, then the post production house will optimize the levels as it thinks necessary. Although mastering is a straightforward process to apply, it is impossible to ‘unmaster’ a track. Best advice is to make a mix without any compression or limiting on the stereo mix and maybe some EQ if you wish. Also, your mix should be about 3 db down from your highest peaks in the song. This is a good starting point that recommend to my clients prior to mastering there project. This way you always have a clean, unmastered version of the mix that is versatile and can be applied to any kind of use.