The Loudness War

Many years ago, record companies realized that most people prefer music when it sounds louder. (See wikipedia and this article.) This isn't just a matter of turning it up. Rather, what people respond to is the average loudness, and you can increase that by compressing the music: making the quiet parts louder, basically. 

The downside is that what you gain in 'loudness' you are losing in dynamic range, which is part of what makes music interesting. You also lose resolution. That is, differences get lost when you pack everything into tiny boxes. But most big record companies stopped caring about sound quality a long time ago, and so nowadays it's hard to buy a CD that isn't terribly compressed.

You can see this yourself: just rip a CD (or record from some streaming service), and look at the waveform in, say, Audacity. You're likely to see something like this:

See how the level is often near the peak?

Those of us who love vinyl love it, in part, because at least many vinyl releases nowadays aren't compressed to the same degree. Want proof? Take a look at these two images:

The top image is taken from the same recording as previously. The bottom image is exactly the same song, but recorded from vinyl. Note how much more variation there is in the level. (And, oh by the way, one of the great advantages of CDs was supposed to be their increased dynamic range. So much for that.)

This is not some fancy audiophile recording, either. It's the first Lacuna Coil EP, recently re-issued by the Spanish label Alone Records. Obviously, it would have been cut from a digital master, but they apparently used a different one.

I'm planning to do some more comparisons of this kind in the next few weeks. This one I just did out of pure curiosity. I'm now even more curious to see which of the recent vinyl releases I've been buying of bands of this kind---Nightwish, Epica, etc---also was made with such care.