As a musician, audiophile, and amateur home recording enthusiast, I know first hand what a great sounding recording through a good pair of speakers sounds like.  The subtleties of a dynamic recording can’t be fully appreciated on a set of earbuds or even small headphones. However, let me be up front and say that I do own an iPod and often listen to my music on earbuds. So that being said, I still find this article interesting and somewhat sad. I worry that a whole new generation of music listeners are only going to have music that is flatly mixed with no dynamics.

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.”

Read full article here

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