“The Loudness Wars” is a trend of raising the audio levels in a recorded piece of music. Increasing loudness in music was first documented in the 1940’s. The topic of loudness was re-visited with the arrival of digital signal processing as it was able to achieve a more significant loudness. The capacity to alter volume was also limited due to the constraints of the vinyl technology. Extreme loudness attempts may render the medium unusable. Because digital media such as CDs eliminate these constraints, increased loudness levels have become a more serious concern in the CD age. The maximum peak volume of analogue recordings like these is restricted by the differing specifications of electronic equipment from source to listener, which includes vinyl and Compact Cassette players.
In the early 1990s, CDs with louder music levels started to come about. By the early 2000s, the loudness war had become extremely known with the release of Metallica’s Death Magnetic album in 2008, the albums cd edition had a higher than average volume, and drew national attention to loud mastering practices.
Now, streaming providers use normalized volume levels by default, raising the volume levels of quieter masters and lowering the volume of louder ones, signaling the end of the loudness wars.
CitationsLoudness War (2023) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war (Accessed: 01 June 2023).