'Dynamic Range' & The Loudness War
Read: Read on Omnivore Read: Read Original date published: date read: 2023-07-25 author: description: We all know music is getting louder. But is it less dynamic? Our ground-breaking research proves beyond any doubt that the answer is no — and that popular beliefs about the ‘loudness war’ need a radical rethink. tags:
Highlights
today’s records are roughly 5dB louder than they were in the ’70s.🔗
Based on the same 4500 tracks, this simplified crest factor is shown falling by 3dB since the beginning of the ’80s, reinforcing the suspicion that the increase in loudness we’ve been witnessing since the ’90s was brought by dynamic compression.🔗
we’ve seen during this article that the loudness war actually didn’t result in any reduction in the closest well-defined descriptor there is to “dynamic range”, which is loudness range as defined by the EBU 3342 technical document. Neither is it possible to ascertain any decrease of dynamic variability at any scale.🔗
Obviously, limiting does something ‘wrong’ with the signal, otherwise people wouldn’t be complaining so much — even though they apparently point at the wrong signal descriptor.🔗