Primer on the Loudness of CDs

I’ve talked here before about the loudness of modern CDs. CDs these days are a compressed, fatiguing affair. The difference between CDs mastered fifteen and twenty years ago is striking to today’s CDs. It’s a huge difference, and all of that extra loudness today is coming at the expense of the music.

Slashdot linked to an article in IEEE Spectrum entitled The Future of Music by Suhas Sreedhar. It’s spread over three pages and is an excellent introduction to this topic. Sreedhar looks at music mastering of the past – looking briefly at how record companies tried to make vinyl louder. He thens delves into the current state of music including not only CDs but also formats such as MP3 and Apple’s AAC.

The curious thing and an interesting question that the article raised in my mind is why haven’t the newer digital formats taken off. There are two higher resolution formats out there. One is called SACD, or Super Audio CD, and the other is DVD-A, or DVD Audio. Despite the CD in its name, SACD is actually also written to a DVD-style disc. Both of these formats resolve the issue of loudness as explained in the article, but neither has made much of a dent. They were initially released seven years ago, but finding albums in either format is difficult if not impossible with a poor selection of releases to boot.

Part of the problem is that both formats address the problem of the CD, that is, that you can freely rip a CD to your hard drive. As far as I know, there is no legal way to rip a SACD disc to your hard drive, and SACD especially seems to be tied to the physical media. SACD basically doesn’t exist as a computerized format. So if you purchase a DVD-A or a SACD disc, you’re tied to playing it in a player attached to a home stereo. You won’t be able to play it on your computer, and you won’t be able to play it in the car or wherever else you may want to listen to the music.

Being that tied to the physical medium is, these days, a huge downside. It’s hard to justify an expenditure in those formats with such major limitations. And because they’ve made such a small impact in the marketplace, there’s no guarantee that these formats will be around in a few years or that one would even be able to find players for such formats.

Sreedhar makes a good point that the loudness of modern CDs is also apparent in digital downloads of music. Digital downloads are essentially just compressed versions of the CD songs, so the ills of the CDs have been visited upon the lower quality download market. Apple made a step in the right direction by releasing some albums with 256 Kbit encoding, unlike the crappy 128 Kbit recording they’ve been pushing for years. Unfortunately for digital music you’ll still pay almost as much as for the actual CD, but the quality is much less. I still like finding albums on vinyl when I can. I don’t mind being tied to my turntable to play records. But it just seems natural that a digital format such as SACD should be computer-accessible.

Update: A comment on Slashdot pointed to a Wikipedia entry on the loudness war. I was interested to see that they mentioned Lily Allen’s album Alright, Still in this Guardian article as being mastered too loud. I have a limited pressing of Alright, Still on vinyl, and clearly they did not remaster the recording for vinyl. It is easily the worst sounding LP in my collection. When you put that recent album side-by-side with just about anything else, the difference is hideously clear.