If you care at all about music—if kicking back with a favourite CD, mp3, or even old-school vinyl or tape is anywhere in your repertoire of happy things to do—then sit up and pay attention. There’s something you need to know, something that will anger and disappoint you if you care at all about music.
The record industry is making a change—and not for the better. They want to downgrade not only the quality of future releases, but also previously released material you might not yet have acquired. It’s happening already, and if you haven’t heard of it yet, you soon will.
Let’s start at the beginning, about five or six years ago. The industry, still glowing from the previous decade’s switch to CDs from analogue records and tapes, suddenly found itself on the wrong end of the new digital age. All of a sudden there was an even newer medium to contend with: a little something called the mp3. Suddenly, mere teens—a vital demographic to music industry honchos—could, in the privacy of their own rooms, share music across the Internet to others, whoever wanted it, for free!
The music industry responded by calmly dropping a brick in its drawers.
And then it picked up its phone, called its lawyer, and the battle was on. Suddenly, you could be sued for sharing out music. Sure, this had been going on for decades already, ever since the invention of the Compact Cassette. Back then, you dubbed music in real time from vinyl onto analogue tape. The industry winced, but let it pass. So why the freak out now?
Because now copying music was easy, and faster. Now you didn’t even have to walk to your friend’s home blocks away to give him a copy of the latest hot album. Now it was being done en masse, and now it was seriously cutting into the profit margin of the big giant music firms.
(Never mind that it didn’t have to be that way. Never mind that outfits like Sony could have embraced the new tech by launching their own online stores years ahead of iTunes. Never mind the fact that most people would have embraced downloading their music legally, if the infrastructure had been in place from the start. The quality of that Guns n’ Roses tune would be guaranteed, after all, unlike the crappy rip produced by too-fast second-rate software run by someone’s fifteen-year-old kid. But no, the industry thought it would be cooler just to sue its potential customers.)
Eventually, of course, the industry was forced to accept the new reality. Now, more music is purchased by way of legal downloads than through new CDs. So what’s the problem?
The problem is that, suddenly, the quality is no longer there. Please understand, I’m not speaking here of the comparison of mp3s to CDs, nor of vinyl to anything else. (Yes, an audiophile like myself would be happy to tell you that an iTunes 228 kbps mp4 file cannot compare to the 1441 kbps quality of a CD, but that’s not what I’m talking about.) Music just sounds different, no matter what format you get it in. Say, for example, that you’ve lost your 10-year-old CD copy of U2’s 1983 classic album October. You originally heard it on vinyl on your older brother’s stereo, and then you bought that CD. Both sounded fantastic, but now you’ve lost your copy.
No problem, you decide; you’ll just buy a new CD. So that’s what you do. And you take it home, and listen to it, and all seems the same. And yet…
…not quite the same. Somehow, the music on this new copy is harsher, especially when the band really hits those crescendos. You look with suspicion at your trusty old sound system. Is it time for a replacement? Are the speakers finally wearing out? Or is it something else?
I’ll give you a hint: it’s something else.
Maybe you’ll recall what happens when you load an mp3 player with random music. As you work your way through the playlist, you might notice that some tracks are much louder than others. There’s always been a variation in how loud some companies program their discs. The problem when you’re playing a mix is that you’re always adjusting the volume up and down.
Worse, if you’re a recording artist and your song comes up at a party and it’s quieter than the others…well, that’s the kiss of death. Unless someone cranks up the volume, your song will sound…well, weaker somehow. Less noticeable. Less noticed.
So recording company executives at Company A respond by upping the volume on their new releases. Company B follows suit, making theirs just a bit louder than Company A’s—it’s a competitive business, after all. So Company A begins making theirs even louder, then louder still, until…they hit the wall. See, CDs, like every other recording medium, have an upper limit to their volume. So what happens when that limit is reached, and you still feel the need to make it louder?
Two things. You keep going, for one thing, allowing the sharp upper peaks of the sound wave to flatten against the ceiling. This is called “clipping”, also referred to as distortion, and it sounds like crap. It’s what you used to get in the “old days” when copying a record onto cassette, if you brought your levels up so high that it caused the VU meters to dance into the red zone.
The other thing you do is, you start bumping up the volume of the quieter parts of the track, more and more, until they’re pretty much as loud as the loud parts. This is called “crappy dynamic range”, and it’s another thing that makes music sound really, really bad. It’s what many radio stations do when they want people to play their station at work, or in businesses. The last thing you want as a business owner is to be constantly turning down the loud songs (or the loud parts of songs), then turning it back up when the quiet ones come on. So radio stations filter their music to always play at the same volume.
It might not be so apparent on that mp3 player on your morning subway ride; it may even sound better because you’re not constantly going for the volume control. But at home, on a half-decent sound system? Not so good. It might not actually sound bad, but the clipping and constant volume wear you down on a sub-conscious level. Somehow, you are inclined not to listen to that album as often.
Which, of course, might leave you inclined to go back to the store for something new. Ka-ching, go the record execs.
The worst part of this is, it’s being done to classic albums as well. Recently I had the misfortune of purchasing U2’s October, a magnificent album released in 1981 by a talented bunch of guys. I say misfortune because it seemed to suffer at least some of that new over-modulated harshness. Suspicious, I checked out the album cover, and sure enough, there were words I’ve learned to dread: “Digitally Re-mastered”.
Re-mastered. Right.
So as a little experiment, off I went to Tramp’s, a nice used-music store downtown. I picked myself up an old copy of October, one of the original 1981 CDs. I took it home, and sure enough, it sounded somewhat better. So I decided to rip them both onto my computer, and compare the results visually. The results were by far not the worst example you could find, but disturbing nonetheless.
First, here’s the 1981 disc (click to see better, use Back to get back here). The track is track 5, Fire:
Now let’s have a boo at the 2008 “re-mastered” version. You can see the difference visually:
See how the loudest parts hit the “walls” at the peaks? Let’s zoom in to one of the loudest bits:
That flat part—right where the vertical yellow line is—is clipped. That portion of the signal has been lost, and cannot be regained. It is, in fact, distortion, and it will sound bad when you play it. And by far, this disc is not the worst offender.
The tragic part of all this is, turning the volume down won’t help. It merely sounds like someone shouting quietly. It’s actually gotten bad enough that I run all my new music through an algorithm to reduce the volume to normal levels, and restore clipping as much as possible. It’s not perfect, but it helps.
Some artists’ music suffer from this problem much more than others. Bruce Springsteen’s (otherwise wonderful) album Magic, for example, has been called unlistenable by many…just read the Amazon reviews. I own the album myself, and love it, but listen to it far less than his earlier stuff. It’s just too…tiring. Californication, by the Red Hot Chili Peppers is also an awesome tune—but yikes:
For more information, see the links below; others have explained the problem better than I have here. As to the answer? Maybe a grass-roots write-in campaign to the masters of the music industry, letting them know how we feel.
This really has got to stop.
Links:
