Comment by jorvi
3 months ago
The loudness wars were mostly an artifact of the 90s-2010s, because consumers were listening on horrible plasticky iPod earbuds or cheap Logitech speakers and the music had to sound good on those.
Once better monitors became more commonplace, mastering became dynamic again.
This is most clear with Metallica's Death Magnetic, which is a brickwalled monstrosity on the 2008 release but was fixed on the 2015 release[0]. And you can see this all over, where albums from the 90s had a 2000s "10-year anniversary" remaster that is heavily compressed, but then a 2010s or 2020s remaster that is dynamic again.
[0] Interestingly enough between those dates, fans extracted the non-brickwalled Guitar Hero tracks and mastered them as well as they could. Fun times :).
Right, that makes sense. And it also makes sense that vinyls didn't suffer from this because the people who would buy those would use them at home with better speakers. Or that classical music CDs throughout the entire period made great use of the dynamic range, since that also is more likely to be listened to on high quality speakers.
Vinyl literally cannot be brickwalled because the needle can't handle it. That's also why vinyl can't handle heavy bass, it'll make the needle vibrate out of the groove. It has nothing to do with the speakers.
It was sort of a happy coincidence that vinyl's limitations forced more dynamic (but less bass-y) masters. Although if your artist didn't do vinyl releases -which really was a dying medium until hipsters brought it back in the 2010s- you were hosed.
> Vinyl literally cannot be brickwalled because the needle can't handle it.
Interesting, I did not know this! I'm not doubting you, but I'm a little confused and curious about how the physics of that works out. Wouldn't being brickwalled mean the volume stays pretty constant, meaning there's less work for the needle? Or is there some kind of limit to how many overlapping waveforms a needle can pick up at once?
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