The Death of High Fidelity - In the age of MP3s, sound quality is worse than ever

David Bendeth, a producer who works with rock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he makes are often played through tiny computer speakers by fans who are busy surfing the Internet. So he's not surprised when record labels ask the mastering engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels so high that even the soft parts sound loud. Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. "They make it loud to get [listeners'] attention," Bendeth says. Engineers do that by applying dynamic range compression, which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a song. Like many of his peers, Bendeth believes that relying too much on this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power and leave listeners with what engineers call ear fatigue. "I think most everything is mastered a little too loud," Bendeth says. "The industry decided that it's a volume contest."

Producers and engineers call this "the loudness war," and it has changed the way almost every new pop and rock album sounds. But volume isn't the only issue. Computer programs like Pro Tools, which let audio engineers manipulate sound the way a word processor edits text, make musicians sound unnaturally perfect. And today's listeners consume an increasing amount of music on MP3, which eliminates much of the data from the original CD file and can leave music sounding tinny or hollow. "With all the technical innovation, music sounds worse," says Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, who has made what are considered some of the best-sounding records of all time. "God is in the details. But there are no details anymore."

The idea that engineers make albums louder might seem strange: Isn't volume controlled by that knob on the stereo? Yes, but every setting on that dial delivers a range of loudness, from a hushed vocal to a kick drum — and pushing sounds toward the top of that range makes music seem louder. It's the same technique used to make television commercials stand out from shows. And it does grab listeners' attention — but at a price. Last year, Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone that modern albums "have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static."

In 2004, Jeff Buckley's mom, Mary Guibert, listened to the original three-quarter-inch tape of her son's recordings as she was preparing the tenth-anniversary reissue of Grace. "We were hearing instruments you've never heard on that album, like finger cymbals and the sound of viola strings being plucked," she remembers. "It blew me away because it was exactly what he heard in the studio."

To Guibert's disappointment, the remastered 2004 version failed to capture these details. So last year, when Guibert assembled the best-of collection So Real: Songs From Jeff Buckley, she insisted on an independent A&R consultant to oversee the reissue process and a mastering engineer who would reproduce the sound Buckley made in the studio. "You can hear the distinct instruments and the sound of the room," she says of the new release. "Compression smudges things together."

Too much compression can be heard as musical clutter; on the Arctic Monkeys' debut, the band never seems to pause to catch its breath. By maintaining constant intensity, the album flattens out the emotional peaks that usually stand out in a song. "You lose the power of the chorus, because it's not louder than the verses," Bendeth says. "You lose emotion."

The inner ear automatically compresses blasts of high volume to protect itself, so we associate compression with loudness, says Daniel Levitin, a professor of music and neuroscience at McGill University and author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Human brains have evolved to pay particular attention to loud noises, so compressed sounds initially seem more exciting. But the effect doesn't last. "The excitement in music comes from variation in rhythm, timbre, pitch and loudness," Levitin says. "If you hold one of those constant, it can seem monotonous." After a few minutes, research shows, constant loudness grows fatiguing to the brain. Though few listeners realize this consciously, many feel an urge to skip to another song.

"If you limit range, it's just an assault on the body," says Tom Coyne, a mastering engineer who has worked with Mary J. Blige and Nas. "When you're fifteen, it's the greatest thing — you're being hammered. But do you want that on a whole album?"

To an average listener, a wide dynamic range creates a sense of spaciousness and makes it easier to pick out individual instruments — as you can hear on recent albums such as Dylan's Modern Times and Norah Jones' Not Too Late. "When people have the courage and the vision to do a record that way, it sets them apart," says Joe Boyd, who produced albums by Richard Thompson and R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction. "It sounds warm, it sounds three-dimensional, it sounds different. Analog sound to me is more emotionally affecting."

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Rock and pop producers have always used compression to balance the sounds of different instruments and to make music sound more exciting, and radio stations apply compression for technical reasons. In the days of vinyl rec- ords, there was a physical limit to how high the bass levels could go before the needle skipped a groove. CDs can handle higher levels of loudness, although they, too, have a limit that engineers call "digital zero dB," above which sounds begin to distort. Pop albums rarely got close to the zero-dB mark until the mid-1990s, when digital compressors and limiters, which cut off the peaks of sound waves, made it easier to manipulate loudness levels. Intensely compressed albums like Oasis' 1995 (What's the Story) Morning Glory? set a new bar for loudness; the songs were well-suited for bars, cars and other noisy environments. "In the Seventies and Eighties, you were expected to pay attention," says Matt Serletic, the former chief executive of Virgin Records USA, who also produced albums by Matchbox Twenty and Collective Soul. "Modern music should be able to get your attention." Adds Rob Cavallo, who produced Green Day's American Idiot and My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade, "It's a style that started post-grunge, to get that intensity. The idea was to slam someone's face against the wall. You can set your CD to stun." It's not just new music that's too loud. Many remastered recordings suffer the same problem as engineers apply compression to bring them into line with modern tastes. The new Led Zeppelin collection, Mothership, is louder than the band's original albums, and Bendeth, who mixed Elvis Presley's 30 #1 Hits, says that the album was mastered too loud for his taste. "A lot of audiophiles hate that record," he says, "but people can play it in the car and it's competitive with the new Foo Fighters record."

Just as cds supplanted vinyl and cassettes, MP3 and other digital-music formats are quickly replacing CDs as the most popular way to listen to music. That means more conven- ience but worse sound. To create an MP3, a computer samples the music on a CD and compresses it into a smaller file by excluding the musical information that the human ear is less likely to notice. Much of the information left out is at the very high and low ends, which is why some MP3s sound flat. Cavallo says that MP3s don't reproduce reverb well, and the lack of high-end detail makes them sound brittle. Without enough low end, he says, "you don't get the punch anymore. It decreases the punch of the kick drum and how the speaker gets pushed when the guitarist plays a power chord."

But not all digital-music files are created equal. Levitin says that most people find MP3s ripped at a rate above 224 kbps virtually indistinguishable from CDs. (iTunes sells music as either 128 or 256 kbps AAC files — AAC is slightly superior to MP3 at an equivalent bit rate. Amazon sells MP3s at 256 kbps.) Still, "it's like going to the Louvre and instead of the Mona Lisa there's a 10-megapixel image of it," he says. "I always want to listen to music the way the artists wanted me to hear it. I wouldn't look at a Kandinsky painting with sunglasses on."

Producers also now alter the way they mix albums to compensate for the limitations of MP3 sound. "You have to be aware of how people will hear music, and pretty much everyone is listening to MP3," says producer Butch Vig, a member of Garbage and the producer of Nirvana's Never- mind. "Some of the effects get lost. So you sometimes have to over-exaggerate things." Other producers believe that intensely compressed CDs make for better MP3s, since the loudness of the music will compensate for the flatness of the digital format.

As technological shifts have changed the way sounds are recorded, they have encouraged an artificial perfection in music itself. Analog tape has been replaced in most studios by Pro Tools, making edits that once required splicing tape together easily done with the click of a mouse. Programs like Auto-Tune can make weak singers sound pitch-perfect, and Beat Detective does the same thing for wobbly drummers.

"You can make anyone sound professional," says Mitchell Froom, a producer who's worked with Elvis Costello and Los Lobos, among others. "But the problem is that you have something that's professional, but it's not distinctive. I was talking to a session drummer, and I said, 'When's the last time you could tell who the drummer is?' You can tell Keith Moon or John Bonham, but now they all sound the same."

So is music doomed to keep sounding worse? Awareness of the problem is growing. The South by Southwest music festival recently featured a panel titled "Why Does Today's Music Sound Like Shit?" In August, a group of producers and engineers founded an organization called Turn Me Up!, which proposes to put stickers on CDs that meet high sonic standards.

But even most CD listeners have lost interest in high-end stereos as surround-sound home theater systems have become more popular, and superior-quality disc formats like DVD-Audio and SACD flopped. Bendeth and other producers worry that young listeners have grown so used to dynamically compressed music and the thin sound of MP3s that the battle has already been lost. "CDs sound better, but no one's buying them," he says. "The age of the audiophile is over."

(On the next page: Top artists and producers sound off on the sound wars. Plus: Check out waveforms to see what dynamic compression looks like, and more.)

Rock and Roll PING!

Time was that Motown songs were mixed for playback on an AM car radio (since that is where the market was likely to first hear the tracks).

Meanwhile vinyl LPs of new recordings continue to come out (and out sold the next generation of CD formats).

Radio and TV advertisers have utilized this to make ads "louder" than surrounding programming for many years.

The age of the audiophile is over.”

Sigh .. meanwhile pop tarts and semi nude kids dance on-stage while lip syncing and publicly saying that the lead musician shouldn't be concerning with learning to sing because it cuts into the study time for being a “front man,” whatever that is.

At least they aren’t all even pretending to be musicians anymore.

Now the semi nude doesn’t bother me at all but there should be real talent. I could see untalented by going to any cheap strip club.

Remastering and remixing songs is as old as time in the music biz. This is one reason that record collectors seek out the original singles (and the small label versions of songs before they got picked up for national distribution). It was commonly done without artist input.

There are plenty of cases where the "hit" version of a song as we know it today is not the version of the song that "hit" on the charts way back when.

And when it comes to "best of" albums, there are alternate takes where someone didn't know which tape to grab off the shelf (and they might have even grabbed different takes for the stereo and mono releases of the "best of").

This is just a return to the days when people listened to pop music on cheap radios. Then we went through a period when rock seem to be defined by compression.

There are always a few people who like to hear dynamic range in music, as opposed to loudness.

Funny, I happen to be one of those retro types who thinks vinyl sounds much, much richer than CDs. And that MP-3 is worse sound quality than CD.

I hooked up a turntable to my stereo this past weekend and spun some old vinyl. My teen aged son listened, and agreed that the sound quality was superior to his MP-3 and to CDs.

I think we have been manipulated by marketing gurus to believe that the latest contraption is superior, rather than just more convenient.

If it's too loud, you're too old. "Don't you boys know any NICE songs?" Neighbor Lady shouting on Joe's Garage.

I’ve started re-ripping my CDs at the highest bit-rate available in Windows media. The old reduced-bit-rate was fine for the typical rock stuff I had, but when I put some of my more complicated stuff on my computer, it sounded like crap.

It is hugely noticeable for example when I ripped my Michelle Tumes CDs. I couldn’t listen to them at the lower bit rates.

Radio Stations, especially those playing Rock, went thru this phase 30 years ago. Each station tried to sound louder than all the others on the dial.

Then one day a radio station decided not to wage the loudness war. Guess what? Their audience grew at the expense of all the others broadcasting “noise”

Nowadays the radio stations still use compression to stand out on the dial, but it is usually very subtle, sometimes actually improving the recording.

That said, I cannot listen to any MP3 music. It sounds terrible. Even CDs have distortion that I can hear with my 73 year old ears.

I do a lot with MP3 music files. I always save at a 320 bit rate. That’s what I transfer if I want to cut to CD. And, the file size is still far less than a WAV fle would be. If I only want to put a bunch of stuff on an MP3 player I’ll remaster to a 128 bit rate.

I have a CD at home that I recorded onto my hard drive, so that I could listen to it on my computer speakers or headphones without the CD in the tray. Windows offered me two versions of recording the music off the CD to the hard drive: "High Fidelity", and MP3.

So I did it both ways. One simple 3 minute song is High Fidelity mode is a file of about 18 Megs. The MP3 version of the same song is less than 3 Megs.

So MP3 recordings only contain about 15% of the original content of the recording.

My car stereo can play MP3's as well. So I loaded the High Def version of the songs onto a jump drive, and plugged it into my car stereo. It can't read this format, so I can only play the low-def MP3 version on the road. As the article explains, all the dynamic range, and many of the vocal and musical details turn to mush, when most of the "music" is processed out of the file.

I don't know what the answer is, but MP3 "music" pretty much just flat out sucks, to my ears.

So I did it both ways. One simple 3 minute song is High Fidelity mode is a file of about 18 Megs. The MP3 version of the same song is less than 3 Megs.

At three megs it is likely a 128 sample rate file. My Windows Media version (10) allows you to set the bit rate for MP3's. Try sampling at a 320 bit rate and see what you think. The file size will probably be up around 7 Megs.

Vinyl, CD, or MP3, I can’t tell the difference - then again, I was in the Artillery and one of my favorite sports is shooting. At work, My ears are constantly assaulted by white noise generators (sounds like a toilet that needs its handle jiggled...).
Earplugs or no, I guess my hearing has taken a beating. Might explain things.

That’s an interesting article. The over use of compression seems similar to the “wall of sound” style of Phil Spector. I never really like the wall of sound, it made every thing sound mushy and not distinct.

Nowadays the radio stations still use compression to stand out on the dial, but it is usually very subtle, sometimes actually improving the recording.

Very true. When I worked in radio, our compression often improved the tinny sound of many 45 rpm singles. You could really hear the difference between in-studio monitoring and broadcast sound of the record. Much fuller, warmer, sound on the air.

Back in the 60s, most records were mixed for AM radio which is why very little of the Beach Boys music was recorded in stereo. Chances are, if one has a CD of Beach Boys hits in stereo, they are not the original radio hit. Just listen to the difference between the mono (radio) version of "Help Me Rhonda" and the stereo version found on most CDs today.

There is the aspect of the wide dynamic range of CDs having a certain incompatability with automotive and road background noise on a car stereo. Classical is very prone to this being a limitation.

The quiet passages are too quiet and turning up the volume makes the louder passages too loud. When this was first a problem on the high quality metal tape players, some compression was even added back on some systems.

While many sedans are quieter, I have a predeliction toward big heavy four wheel drive vehicles.

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