On 28 Jun 2006, at 1:23 PM, Andrew Stiller wrote:
Around 1985, I complained in a concert review that the word
"electroacoustic" meant "too damn loud." I don't think things
have gotten any louder since then. They couldn't possibly.
In the recorded world, they have, absolutely. Since the dawn of the
CD era (when there was a brief but quickly abandoned trend towards
exploiting the CD's extended dynamic range), there's been an arms
race of compression going on. There's enormous pressure for mastering
engineers to make the record "hotter" so it stands out on the radio,
or at home compared to other CDs played at the same volume setting on
your stereo, and (recently) so it still hits hard when transformed
into an MP3 and played on crappy iPod headphones. If you rip any
recent pop CD and look at the waveform, it's going to be more or less
a solid brick the whole way through. This phenomenon is not limited
to the pop world, though -- jazz and classical recordings are all
much more compressed than they were 10 years ago, and the average dB
level is much, much higher.
More info:
<http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/imperfect-
sound-forever.htm>
- Darcy
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Brooklyn, NY
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