This is probably the 4th time in the past 18 months I’ve seen an overcompression story surface.
The Death of High Fidelity : Rolling Stone
The thesis is that since the development of digital audio it has been much easier to increase the perceived loudness of a recording by compressing the heck out of it, thus destroying dynamic range. My perception is that the mid-90s were probably the golden age for CD mixes: it was picking up steam, engineers were getting more comfortable mastering for it, and the loudness war hadn’t quite set in.
Plus, it was around that time that I was buying my first CDs.
I placed some tracks into Soundtrack Pro 2 to check out the waveforms. From top to bottom, roughly chronologically, these are:
- God Only Knows – The Beach Boys (some remastered version)
- Hello, It’s Me – Todd Rundgren
- True Faith – New Order
- Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through – Meat Loaf
- Pardon My Freedom – !!!
- What You Waiting For? – Gwen Stefani
- Nobody Wants To – Crowded House
After you get done making fun of my music tastes, guess which one is the loudest.