There has been a war raging in the recording industry for over 20 years now. Although it has slowed a bit, there still appears to be no end in site. It is the ‘Loudness War’. This war started to occur as Producers and Record Labels pressured mastering engineers to make songs louder and louder. It started off innocent enough, but has continued to snowball until a mastering engineer’s job is no longer to ‘make it sound better’, but ‘to make it as loud as possible’. Watch the video below to get a better idea of what we are talking about.
Notice how all of the beautiful dynamics have disappeared all in a hopeless battle against the listener’s volume knob. Here are a few more videos with examples showing how ridiculous this is.
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