Why are records so loud today?

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Loudness war

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaThe trend of increasing loudness as shown by waveform images of "Something" by The Beatles mastered on CD four times since 1983.

The loudness war, also referred to as the loudness race, is a publicized criticism of the recording industry's practice of digitally mastering albums with progressively increasing levels of loudness and reduced dynamic range.

The phenomenon developed as the result of the widespread adoption of the compact disc digital music format. The recording process of early CD releases differed from prior analog methods that had no set ratio of minimum to maximum level of perceived loudness. Dynamic range was dictated by the playback limitations of analog equipment, including vinyl record and cassette players. With the advent of CDs, music was encoded to a digital format with a clearly defined 16 bit dynamic range, equal roughly to 96 dB. Since most musical performances have a smaller dynamic range than that afforded by CDs, their recordings rarely approached the maximum possible levels. The loudest parts of a musical performance, the peak levels, serve to contrast with quieter passages which determine the initial volume setting chosen by the listener. With time, members of the music industry sought to promote their recordings by amplifying the average volume of a performance to fit a greater portion of the overall dynamic range of CDs. This method set recordings apart by offering listeners a subjectively "louder" listening experience.[1]

However, once the maximum amplitude of a CD is reached, the perception of loudness can be increased only by a combination of dynamic range compression and make-up gain[citation needed]. This is achieved by applying an increasingly high ratio of compression to the dynamic range of the recording and then increasing the gain of the recording until the peaks have reached maximum. Extreme uses of dynamic range compression can introduce audible distortion or clipping to the waveform of the recording. Modern albums that utilize dynamic range compression therefore sacrifice the quality of musical reproduction in favor of the illusion of loudness. The competitive escalation of volume has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as victims of a "loudness war".