Music Tuesday #110: Remaster Rants

 I hope you know of the loudness war in music? That thing where music is produced for the lower common denominator of music reproduction:  cheap headsets and car stereos.   Also because the music industry thinks we buy more music if it sounds loud.  That is partially true, but it is also very tiring to listen to.  Dynamics in music (the difference in loudness throughout a song) makes you listen and allows to enjoy the music.   Imagine a movie which has nothing but explosions for 90 minutes...  that would be just too intense to enjoy.  Guess what, almost all popular music recorded since the late 90s has this issue.

Now almost all old music you will find on Spotify are remastered versions. And guess what: it makes the old stuff less enjoyable.  Therefore I keep my old CDs and vinyl, because they contain dynamics which I can't enjoy with the streaming services.  I would love to get access to the high dynamic recordings, preferably through a Spotify setting which only offers those to me when I search. Maybe that will change the industry?

Interested in discovering properly recorded music?  Check the dynamic range database here: http://dr.loudness-war.info/

You will see a lot of classical and jazz music scoring high in this database. There are some interesting entries here just like this fantastic song by Avenged Sevenfold who wrote this song after a band member died.  This is a great example of the revival of American metal, where some metal bands were going more mainstream again (e.g. Disturbed).

Peak loudness is still right at the edge of the theoretical max, but the RMS for this song is quite OK.  The youtube version does seems to have been dynamically compressed though... sigh...

Avenged Sevenfold - Nightmare
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94bGzWyHbu0