Below is a letter written by Angelo Montrone, Vice President of A&R at One Haven Music, a Sony Music Company.

The letter relates to how the over-compressed mixes of today have damaged music, and how this effects peoples enjoyment of music, and recorded sound. It is an issue that engineers and studios have been aware of for a long time.

Truth be told, if one matches the real volume or level of a modern day mix, and a mix from the early 1990's, one would hear how much more punchy and dynamic those mixes from the early 90's were.

Having someone of Angelo's stature comment on this shows that there is growing concern amongst the people who are in the know.

Something else to think about is the fact that this does not affect only music, but film and television too. How often have you had to reach for the TV remote because the adverts are so much louder than the program you're watching?

Below is Angelo's letter, and responses from many industry greats to it.

Email us with your thoughts, and maybe we'll post them for all to read.

Enjoy

dan@audioboutique.co.za

Bob,

There's something far more sinister in audio that is causing our listeners fatigue and even pain while trying to enjoy their favorite music. It has been propagated by A&R departments for the last 8 years:

The complete abuse of compression in mastering (forced on the mastering engineers against their will and better judgment).

The mistaken belief that a "super loud" record will sound better and magically turn a song into a hit has caused most major label releases in the past 8 years to be an aural assault on the listener. Have you ever heard one of those test tones on TV when the station is off the air? Notice how it becomes painfully annoying in a very short time? That's essentially what you do to a song when you super compress it. You eliminate all dynamics.

This phenomenon is tantamount to a dessert chef deciding that since the frosting is the most exciting part, the cake should be all frosting.

Just to prove that the "super loud" record has no correlation to actual sales, when we mastered the first Los Lonely Boys record I went to the session and specifically told our mastering engineer NOT to make this a loud record. Could it be that a record that actually had dynamic range could compete? 2.5 million records and a year of constant airplay of "Heaven" confirmed my suspicion. Loud records are for the birds.

I dare any label A&R exec to make the decision to stop abusing the very listeners who are supposed to be enjoying our artists and tell the mastering engineer it does NOT have to be super compressed.

----- a little more info on this phenomenon:

Prior to the mid 90's there was always some level of compression done tastefully and left to the mastering engineer's discretion. This allowed some dynamic range. Things got loud then soft again, the music could build, retreat and build bigger the next time. Between the kick and the snare there were brief moments to allow the eardrums to relax and get ready for the next hit. Just go back and listen for 15 minutes to any rock record mastered in the early 90's (or earlier) and then put on any modern super loud abomination for the same amount of time. Which do you prefer? There is a white paper written by mastering engineer Bob Katz that demonstrates that CD players (and other digital playback devices) are actually being driven into distortion by these super loud records. Why are we doing this?


Regards,

Angelo Montrone
Vice President / A&R
One Haven Music
(A Sony Music Company)
79 5th Avenue
15th Floor
New York, New York 10003

Ed Trevzger:

Angelo makes a great point. If you want to see for yourself, rip a couple of CD tracks as AIFF files and open them in an audio editor. Grab a track from 25 years ago and a current one. One will look like an EKG and the other like a ribbon. Wired magazine ran a story on this a couple of years back.

Here's a link to that article online with an illustration of the waveforms:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.01/play.html?pg=2

What's even worse is that radio is using multiband compression to squish things even more -- just try listening to an alt rock or pop/punk track on FM. The cymbals pump and distort to the point that it is impossible to listen to. I'll take satellite's artifact-laden digital over distorted analog if forced to choose.

CDs were supposed to allow more dynamic range than vinyl. But with every last smidgen of dynamic range excised, music becomes one-dimensional and fatiguing. This trend has even impacted jazz, with a few horribly mastered releases lately sounding awful next to well-remastered classics.

Is it any wonder people don't listen? It's painful!

Ed Trefzger, Editor
JazzWeek

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KLAnaya:

I couldn't agree more. What we have are a small number of mixers being hired by the majors to do the majority of the mixing, which has kept the creative process very narrow and unimaginative. The A&R community seems to think that if that type of mix(er) was a "hit", replicating it will "guarantee" a hit, and if it's doesn't, it releases them of their responibility. kA

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Kenn Richards:

Wow!

There is someone left with EARS!

Glad to know I am not alone.

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Jamie Myerson:

this is all sad and unfortunately true. i am guilty of this sort of thing all the time in my studio. clients want their stuff to sound huge. and if they even know what mastering is, they don't want to pay for it. so out come the plugins and everything just gets L O U D.

this is something that's going to have to be un-learned (is that a word?) on all sides. tech and consumer alike.

i wish i didn't have to do it. it's hard to explain this type of distortion to people who just don't know what they are listening for. it's not their fault. they just don't know. and it's hard to convince them of anything when all they're used to is the "radio sound" or the "major label" sound.

interestingly and ironically, both of those sound like shit.

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John McBride:

HOLY FUCK!!! Someone who actually knows what the fuck is going on! I could not agree more with Angelo, and have done the exact same thing. I tracked and mixed Martina McBride's latest album "Timeless" and sat in on the mastering (by Richard Dodd) the entire time. We used NO COMPRESSION in mastering - we simply turned it up as loud as we could without the compression and her record sounds HUGE. It is 1-2 db quieter than all the other records coming out of Nashville, but sounds twice as big. I took it a step further - I only used stereo buss compression on one song (in the mixing process) of the 22 that we recorded for Timeless.

There is so much compression on recordings now that the chorus doesn't get any louder than the verse. It is a horrible mistake - but Angelo is right - VOLUME always wins. No artist out there wants their record to sound quieter on the radio than the other artists, or even in the CD player at home, or these days on their ipod as a shitty AAC download. I say this is bullshit. Martina and I own Blackbird Studios in Nashville, and we have six rooms with the absolute finest equipment/microphones/consoles/record space available anywhere in the world. I see this compression thing happen every day, and it is WRONG. The engineers don't like it either, believe me. They are forced by the artists or record companies to make these records as loud as possible, quality/dynamics/art be damned. I have to hope that this trend will go away, and that the record companies will stop dumbing down the public when it comes to quality. If an MP3 is good enough, then something is horribly wrong. Great analogue recording is so far superior to digital recording (and yet so rare) that people have forgotten how good it can sound.

There are two or three generations of engineers that have little or no experience with analogue equipment, and that is killing this business. How can they strive for better quality, when they don't even realize it exists? Digital recording is far superior to what is was ten years ago, but it is still a long way from great.

We recently started recording Martina's next album, and we will not compress this one either. Her integrity is rare, Bob. She cares more about audio quality than any ten pop artists I've ever met. When we track, we never "Fix it in the mix". The players get the parts right, she sings it right (even if it takes days) and it shows in the finished product. Her records have space, depth, and dynamics. Compare her record to any of the pop shit out there and it buries them sonically. The funny thing is that everything we use was available 20 years ago - from the console to the mics to the outboard gear etc. We used Pro Tools at 96K as a tape machine for overdubs, but are recording our tracks on 2" 16 and 24 track machines. It is a wonderful experience. When the players we use (the double scale guys in Nashville) track with Martina, the joy in their performance shines through. Every one of them has talked about how wonderful the audio is on her records. I sound like a blithering idiot right now but I could not agree more with Angelo's post - it is the truth. Thanks for putting it out there.

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Val Garay:

Amen!

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Kevin C.:

Just like the Apples at the "super-market" have to be the shiniest and biggest, even if they taste like shit.

All people in bands "ready to take it to the next level" have to look like cartoon characters too.

Like it or not this is our culture.

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Rob Meurer:

OH MY GOD THIS IS SO TRUE. Big, loud heaps of noise with every drop of feeling wrung out of them.

I've read several articles lately wherein mastering engineers are bemoaning the fact that the mixes they receive are compressed to death., basically removing the wonderfully subtle work of mastering engineers from the process -- there's nothing that can be done about it after the fact.

Jeez, try listening to Radio Disney sometime -- it's all one huge exploding song.

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Morris:

What Angelo says is totally true. By the mid-nineties, most records were being "cranked up" (compressed) so high, there was no choice but to compress your own record so it wouldn't sound "quiet" when matched up against other songs on the radio. I did this on hundreds of masters, all analog recordings, and believe me, it would not have been my choice, if I had one. The result is a loss of dynamics, and a painfully grating sound. Not to mention, the radio stations already compress tracks when they play them - so, if everyone would lay off the "hot" button, the volume and sound quality could be more uniform.

The same thing happens with television commercials. We have all experienced the sound being much louder when certain commercials come on. You have to run to the remote to turn down the volume. It's annoying, to say the least.

I know why purists are purists. When you spend hours, and sometimes days to get the right mix, only to obliterate your hard work in a short mastering session, it is certainly discouraging.

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Michael Eck:

Mr. Montrone is right on the money with this. And the effect is trickling down. As an independent producer working in small studios, I have noticed the trend seeping into even the lowest budget indie releases. Engineers push all the levels up until everything hits hard and all the nuance of a performance is lost.

If you want to hear what a well-produced, well-engineered and well-mastered rekkid can sound like, check out Joe Henry's 1990 masterpiece "Shuffletown." Producer T-Bone Burnett and engineer Rik Pekkonen captured wonderful stuff by recording the band (which included jazzmen Cecil McBee and Don Cherry) live in the studio, and they knew enough to let the music -- and the sound -- breathe.

The beauty of the digital revolution is that it has -- really for the first time -- put the means of recording music directly into the artist's hands. Mastering rekkids with an actual dynamic range is just one more way to fight back at the mass-porduced sounds of the majors.

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Rock Singer 45:


I couldn't agree with you more, I've notice that lately the practice of so called re-mastering amounts to nothing more that a boosting of the bass and a treble that is so high that my dog wants to roll over and play dead. Just like when CD first came out, I was living in Japan at the time and was working as a DJ for Onkyo, I bought the first player on the market, the Sony CDP101and thought wow I'm the first on my block to have a direct copy of the master tape, boy was I wrong. The record companyies and artists saw a way of making more money with little thought of the art and what they were about to do, so sure fuck the pubic (Wow this is going to sounds a little like W. Bush) by the time they realize what we've done we'll sell them something new, and they did, SACD, DVD Audio, etc.

So sure why wouldn't the public buy downloads...why, because they'll buy anything, you might not realize it but the same thing is going on now with HDTV. I was in Japan a few month ago and got to see their version of HDTV it's called Hi-Vision and although it was invented years before ours, it put our HDTV to shame...you can walk up close to a Hi-Vision screen and you won't see any scan lines what so ever, go to Best Buys and get up close to the their best set and try to do the same thing...it looks like shit, in Japan I was watching a Sumo match where you could see the faces of the people setting in the farthest reaches of the audience clearly.

As long as we are willing to put up with this shit the major's are more than willing to dish it out, hence we act like whores.

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Mike Lawson:

My knee-jerk reaction is, "If its too loud, you're too old." However, this guy is pretty spot on with this comment. How refreshing to read from somebody in A&R.

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Angelo Montrone:

Thanks for putting that out there, Bob.

As a postscript, Michael Caplan and I did the same with the Matisyahu "Live At Stubbs" record. Being involved as producer, engineer and being the mastering engineer I had complete control of levels. I set the compression to achieve similar "loudness" to that of Bonnie Raitt's early 90's "Luck of the Draw". Matis's record spent 9 weeks at #1 on the Billboard Reggae Chart and received airplay across several formats as well as video play. Interestingly, many non-industry people have commented on how that record is very "listenable". It was quite possibly the QUIETEST non jazz/classical
record released last year.

Conclusion: Super-compression/loud levels don't sell records, don't get airplay and, if anything, are annoying listeners.

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Arttu Tolonen:

Finally! Someone knows what's up. The entire music scene in the States (this phenomenon is not as rampant in Europe) has turned into one solid digital sausage-like shape, if you look at a song on the screen. The needle never moves. It's physically tiring to listen to that sort of sound.

I bet if you played it to rats in a cage for a sufficient amount of time (regardless of artist or song), they would start eating each other.

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Mixerman:

Any dumb ass with a computer in his bedroom can obliterate the dynamic range with an L2 brick wall limiter to the point of distortion and clipping.

I would like to add to Angelo Montrone's missive on the loudness wars, as it's my area of expertise. As you know, I'm an LA recording engineer, mixer and producer. Here in LA, we have some of the greatest acoustic spaces and vintage consoles and gear in the world. We have access to high quality instruments of all kinds, and we have some of the best record makers in the world here. We even usually have decent budgets to take the time to make a superior product. Oftentimes, we hand in a superior product, and then the labels take the work to a Mastering Engineer, specifically to obliterate any semblance of depth and sonic range and then crank up the high end in an effort to boost the apparent loudness.

Some people like to argue that only guys in lab coats are worried about sonics. A great song, a great lyric, a great performance. THAT'S what's important. And you know what? I agree. However, it's sound that our brain is deciphering. And therefore sound affects the emotional impact of a song for us. This I can prove, albeit anecdotally. Just listen to any of your favorite old albums on vinyl and compare it to the same song from a CD. Then compare it to an MP3. In both cases, the emotional impact of the song is affected negatively. Why then are MP3s popular? Two reasons. They're more convenient. But more importantly, people don't listen to records like they used to.

When I was a kid, listening to a new album was an interactive experience. I sat in front of the speakers, dissected the liner notes and the lyrics. Sometimes I listened to the album several times in a row. I'm sure some kids still do that, but not like they used to. No, today, people use music as background noise.

Now, the problem with listening to dynamic music in many real-world situations, is you can't hear the low parts. Vacuum cleaners, the dishwasher, the power drill going across the street, the running toilet, the running faucet, baby's crying, the background noise is deafening. The only way to actually combat the background noise is by reducing the dynamic range (preferably within reason) In these situations one can either let the end user even the dynamic range with their wrist (turning the volume up and down) or one can use a brick wall limiter which flattens the peaks of the music, and makes them square. Literally.

If you think back to physics for a moment, (and I'm going to be way overly-simplistic in all technical information here) you'll remember the wave. I remember the instructor drew the wave on the chalkboard. It was kind of curved in nature. Smooth flowing up and down motion. Wavey! It should come as no surprise that sounds that produce smooth curvy waves are generally pleasant to the ear. Then our instructor drew a triangular wave. And he played us an example. Harsh, dude. But in using a severe brick wall limiter, one turns the more smooth flowing pleasant waves of a song and flattens them into what are essentially squares. This makes the music denser, and thus reduces the dynamic range. Well, guess what? Square waves with their sharp edges and corners. They're harsh too.

To make matters worse, as if there could be anything worse than edgy square waves, the labels want their CDs to play louder than other CDs in your turnstyle, or louder than other MP3s in your pod, and most importantly louder on radio than the last song (which is a myth), and so the Mastering Engineers (ME's) have pushed the output level of the music all the way to the digital ceiling. It used to be you came near that ceiling you turned into a pumpkin. Now we hit it as a matter of course. Unfortunately, when you get to the ceiling (and before) you're pretty much distorting. And not the good kind of distortion like from a guitar amp or from a vintage mic pre pushed hard (which it was designed for). We're talking harsh digital distortion and clipping. The harshest and most unmusical distortion there is. This means that technically a CD that is constantly playing at the digital ceiling is distorting at all times. Double whammy!

The most humorous part of all this, is the dumb ass I opened this email with, the one with a computer and an L2, he can fuck up a record just as well and just as easily as the most expensive ME out there. Yet the labels continue to throw $10,000 per album (it takes no more than 6 hours to master an album working slow) to MEs who are known for their "expertise" and willingness to make a record insanely loud and bright. And rather than put out a superior product, a product that the dumb ass with his computer couldn't possibly compete with, the labels have decided it would be best to bring the quality of their product down to that the lowest common denominator. Cool. Now everyone can do it!

To me, the most interesting question is this: Why did music become part of background noise? And I might suggest an answer, which is the point of this email. One of the benefits of insanely loud and bright records is, you can turn them way down and they'll cut through the background noise. So you see, there is a certain irony here (and I never confuse irony with coincidence).

Perhaps, in an effort to specifically cause the end user to listen music louder, perhaps, the labels are responsible for the widespread turning DOWN of music. Perhaps the loudness wars themselves are the reason that music has become background noise

Think about it. Take harsh, overdriven, music that can cut through any extraneous noise, of creatively uninventive music performed by bands as compliant as librarians; add in the equation uninteresting perfectly quantized productions with vocals placed perfectly in tune to the chromatic scale (which is VERY unmusical), and mixes that all sound like they were done by the same guy on the same console with the same gear, on the same week (which is often the case); I mean, let's purposely go out and make a product that does not differentiate itself in any way whatsoever from any other product from any competitors. Given this scenario, what are people going to do?

Turn it up?

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Adam Blake:

Well... Yes and no. The Who's original "My Generation" - which I think we can all agree is a classic - is compressed beyond imagining in the last minute or so. That was Shel Talmy's style. "With The Beatles" is compressed to hell. This isn't subtle! But I do take your co-respondent's point that it has got way out of hand. I once saw a wave form representation of an Oasis album (I think it was "Be Here Now") in a studio and it was just one long straight line! They've got a lot to answer for, those boys.

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Brian Murphy:

God, this rings so true (never mind the ringing in my ears) and explains why you can never synch the sound of CDs while copying songs.

Thanks, Angelo, for letting me know I'm not nuts when I say "Ow!" while listening to new records.

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Stephen Norris Mitchell:

I agree that the art of making warm recordings has been lost in todays digital world.

But compression or not, a hit song is a hit song i.e. "Heaven."

I don't think that song would have sold any less or more had it been mastered differently. The 38 year old housewife still would have loved it...hell, so did I!

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Paul Rappaport:

Thank you Angelo. This is all I was trying to say. Of course I would always consider content--the song, the voice, the message, to be most important. For God's sake "Louie Louie" and all those Beach Boy singles are in my DNA but they didn't enter my psyche in the same way as Pink Floyd or the second side to Abbey Road did by listening to my English pressing because I wanted to hear more(and how about Miles Davis and all that atmosphere!). I know we're not going back to vinyl and that's why I'm so excited about the new technology. In the last ten years our industry has not thought so much about the quality we are bringing to comsumer as much as "hey, will they go for the CD if it's $16.98, $17.98, $18.98?!!!
And I know all that social commentary that some wrote to be true. And to Bob Ezrin: What you wrote was right on but YOU KNEW WHAT YOU WERE DOING WHEN YOU MADE THOSE PINK FLOYD ALBUMS, AND YOU KNEW THAT YOU WERE GOING TO BLOW MINDS WITH THE SOUND as well as with Roger's messages and Gilmour's incredible solos. The consumer deserves this kind of quality and quality helps build our product and the OVERALL IMPORTANCE OF IT in a competitive marketplace. THE SOUND IS ALL WE'VE GOT FOLKS--WE DON'T HAVE PICTURE (and I'm glad MTV's gone--I say let the listener have their own individual and personal movies in their head created by the songs they love--they last longer that way too) . WE MUST CREATE THE PICTURE IN THE LISTENER'S MIND WITH EVERY TOOL WE HAVE. To not use these tools and promote sweet candy for the ears is nuts. This is what we do--WE ARE THE RECORDING BUSINESS!!!!

What Angelo says is true. And you know what? If you put on an AC/DC album and turn it up you will feel like you are "with" the band and the fidelity of all the instruments will cause your feet to move and your hips to sway. If you put on the CD of that same album and turn IT up, all you get is a headache

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Wayne Mitzen:

What I think your reader means is the change in crest factor between new stuff and older recordings. In my mastering suite, I have reference CD rips from recent stuff with the typical squashed sound and stuff, even as recent as Blood Sugar Sex Magic and Pearl Jams's 10... big diff in RMS vs Peak ratios....

I believe the reason for the 6db crest factor is the change of the consumer systems... and maybe what Katz (I've talked to him a few times) mentions, a shifting threshold in the consumers hearing ambient noise factors. Significance must be given though, to smaller driver surface areas typical in modern consumer repro systems.

I think a lot of investigation needs to be focused on the comparison of speaker driver surface area, the effects on instantaneous excitation of the acoustic environment, the ratio and linearity of frequency response to this instantaneous ability in typical home acoustic environments, and how the ear perceives the difference in loudness (ie RMS vs peak program) to these factors.

In his book Mastering Audio (he's fucking amazing/great) he delves into the whole squished audio thing....

As to clipping consumer CD players, a few things... recall I design this shit.... the post DAC analog stages vary as to the matching the designer achieves with regard to 0dB-FS levels of the DAC amp (usually an opamp) to the remaining analog stages... I've noticed a significant difference in low-end CD players.

When mastering Jon's stuff, I noticed severe clipping when I ran close to -0.1dB-FS (this is where the 16 bits go to all 1's) on a few of the small CD players in the house. Believe me, when on a small budget like this, you make the rounds thru the house and to every Best Buy, Tweeter, target with master CD in hand to see how it translates. Any colleague with a CD in the car gets approached...

So I began running absolute noise shaped (this means there's no 16 bit words adjacent in the stream when it get's near the peak limit) to -0.3dB-FS.

Problem solved.... after dissecting a few of the offending units and placing a scope probe on the DAC outputs and the following analog stages, I noticed a huge difference between the CD's limited at -0.1dB-FS and those at -0.3.

Some guys set their limiters at -0.01dB-FS - I've had some major label releases totally trash these poor little CD players; even some of the high end units suffer from this type of overload.

As to my theory, look at most consumer 5.1 systems. Very small driver area. Higher RMS vs peak levels will make most program material sound louder on smaller systems, due to the fact that the ear/brain gauges loudness based on continuous energy levels and has very limited ability to discern peak information.

I really got a buncha meetings for my day job today ( I design stuff for a company founded by ex-NSA types here in DC) so I'd love to explore this a bit more... but hey here's some of my observations and opinions.... for what any of it is worth...

BTW: i did a remaster of Great Gig in the Sky - I think mine sounds better on current consumer systems without killing it...

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Blaine Barcus:

Totally agree, but producers and artists are equally to blame. It's become a "one upmanship" scenario.

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Brian Brinkerhoff:

Iron Maiden didn't even master their soon-to be released record at all!

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Mark Lourie:

I also had a discussion about the death of my interest in listening seriously to music coinciding with the domination of cd over vinyl with a major mastering engineer the other day.

I was an audiophile with a high end system (which I still have, but hardly ever listen to music on) and we loved the better records of the 70's or 80's. Try playing a modern CD against a 10cc record, or a Cat Stevens record, or a Pink Floyd record... I could go on.

For that matter, try playing a Little Feat Mobile Fidelity high speed mastered vinyl "Waiting For Columbus" vs the CD. That little dressing room warm up intro... "join the band" is all you need. The amazing "space" you hear placing yourself with the band in the dressing room is totally gone on the cd.

Anyway, I asked the engineer if it didn't drive him nuts that labels want the cd's to sound "radio friendly" as opposed to open, deep, and wide in frequency response and dynamic range. He said something like, "oh, it's WAY past that now. If it was only "radio friendly" that they wanted, I'd be happy compared to what they want now".

Dumb.

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Phil Pritchett:

They're missing the point. Dead on with the mastering comment but let's remember....where were we listening to those creamy vinyl records? In the privacy and relative quiet of our own homes. On the couch in front of speakers with a glass of wine. This is not where people listen to music anymore. The reason for the mastering is that most people listen to music exclusively in their cars or on an ipod while jogging or whatever. In order to be heard over the noise of traffic, sirens etc., engineers learned that it needed to be LOUD in order to be HEARD. Radio stations started slamming tunes with compression once people had radios in their cars. You would never hear a song intro like Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain" these days.

The reason we were all "affected by vinyl" cannot be attributed to the vinyl itself but simply to HOW we were listening and what we were doing while listening...making love, laying on the bed with headphones on, relaxing.....certainly not not excercising or sitting in traffic on the way to work. No wonder people today associate music with stress! I offer that if more people sat up at night in a low lit room with their ipod playing softly through a stereo, they too would enjoy the experience. It's the environment, stupid.

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Charles Crossley, Jr:

After reading Angelo Montrone's email to you, I went searching for that white paper by Bob Katz where he demonstrates that compression is driving CD players into distortion. Although I couldn't find that one, per se, I did find the following three writings by Katz, and section II of the third one extensively addresses the topic of making a recording better vice "hotter".

http://mixonline.com/online_extras/bob_katz/

http://www.audio-software.com/K-System.html

http://www.digido.com/portal/pmodule_id=11/pmdmode=fullscree n/pageadder_page_id=33/

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Greg Prestopino:

Because everyone started doing it. I love Angelo's comparison to cake frosting; he's right. But a better analogy for the answer to his question might be the reason soccer mom's drive bigger and bigger SUVs: to protect their kids from even bigger SUVs. Or the same reason wars escalate from abductions to leveled cities.

Subtleties are the first things to disappear in the heat of competition.

I have one word for you: steroids.

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Michael Fremer:


He is so right! Except about one thing: It is not only the A&R people who are insisting on the idiotic compression. IT IS THE BANDS THEMSELVES. A friend of mine is one of the "kings of indie mastering," and despite his objections and his good counsel the kids want it LOUDER than the other bands. So there's plenty of blame to go around.

No wonder I went to a kid's "off to college" pool party last week and he was playing "classic rock," which he's been discovering thanks to his dad's record collection...

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Sebastien Chorney:

I have to disagree with Angelo on this one.

Broadcast compressors have been squashing the shit out of everything we've been hearing on radio for the last 40+ years. Recall that the venerable LA-2A, a compressor found in most every professional studio, began its life as a broadcast limiter. Unfortunately, any discretion exercised by the mastering engineer disappears the moment music is sent over the airwaves.

It's true that compression is overused in mastering today. But the only thing that's changed in the last 10 years is that now mastering engineers have caught up to what the broadcasters have been doing to music all along.

All this means for the consumer is that the song sounds just as squashed on the CD as it did when they first heard it on the radio.

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Tom Werman:

On the subject of compression:

During my 12 years as a staff producer and A&R man at Epic, I considered compression only in my capacity as a producer - but never from a label A&R perspective. The producer is clearly responsible for mastering the record. A&R people make suggestions, but you rarely, if ever, would find a label person at a mastering session. If this responsibility now lies with A&R, then things in the record biz may indeed be worse than I am told.

I listened to WNEW FM in the 70's on stereo earphones; as a young, new producer, I was deeply puzzled by the fact that my records -- no matter what I did in the mix -- just didn't have the incredible polish and pump that I heard from everything on WNEW FM. Then one day I heard one of my own mixes -Ted Nugent's "Stranglehold" -- on WNEW, and was stunned and delighted to hear that every move I had made was clear as a bell, and that the record never sounded so good. This was my introduction to compression.

>From that point on, my records were always compressed, but this compression was applied with the moderation, assistance and wisdom of mastering engineers George Marino and Bob Ludwig at Sterling Sound in New York. I learned quickly that compression was to be used with great discretion, since stations already squashed most of what they played, and compression is cumulative. The amount of compression used in mastering is exaggerated and compounded when played over a station that has its own broadcast compressors. The final result can, therefore, sound super-squashed. Still, I could never resist hearing what my mix sounded like with a ton of compression on it - just for fun, and only in the mastering studio - because there was nothing like it. In extreme quantities, it can obscure a host of mixing errors.

In the hands of today's young A&R executives (and I actually do respect a number of them, since my son is one), "compression discretion" could indeed be a very dangerous thing...