'Let's think about how digital recording works. 'Really, the challenge is to maintain the quality of a CD, but to stuff it into a much smaller space,' Oxenham says.

Robert Siegel asked him to explain digital compression. He also started out as a recording engineer. His specialty is auditory perception - how our brains and ears interact. Andrew Oxenham is a professor in the psychology department at the University of Minnesota. I'm glad it's going to be over.'ĭigital compression is the process that allows a song to go from being a very big sound file in its natural state to a very small file in your iPod - so you can carry your entire record library in your pocket. 'But it can get better and I think it will get better. 'It's been really rough, folks,' he says. Ludwig's final assessment of the decade in music? You may have enjoyed the music but you don't really feel like going back and listening to it again.' When you're through listening to a whole album of this highly compressed music, your ear is fatigued. 'I and some other people would submit that another thing that is hurting record sales these days is the fact that they are so compressed that the ear just gets tired of it. 'People talk about downloads hurting record sales,' Ludwig says. If their record jumps out of your iPod compared with the song that preceded it, then they've accomplished their goal.īob Ludwig thinks that's an unfortunate development. That's still a motivation for some producers. 'When I first got into the business and was doing a lot of vinyl disc cutting, one producer after another just wanted to have his 45 sound louder than the next guy's so that when the program director at the Top 40 radio station was going through his stack of 45s to decide which two or three he was going to add that week, that the record would kind of jump out to the program director, aurally at least.' 'The 'Loudness Wars' have gone back to the days of 45s,' Ludwig says. 'And that Metallica record is one of the loudest records ever produced.' 'That record is so loud that there is an outfit in Europe called ITU that now has standardization measurements for long-term loudness,' he says. So the fans were able to hear what it could have been before this compression.'Īccording to Ludwig, 10,000 or more fans signed an online petition to get the band to remix the record. 'And the Guitar Hero doesn't have all the digital domain compression that the CD had. 'It came out simultaneously to the fans as Guitar Hero and the final CD,' Ludwig says. Ludwig says the 'Loudness War' came to a head last year with the release of Metallica's album Death Magnetic. He's referring to the practice of using compressors to squash the music, making the quiet parts louder and the loud parts a little quieter, so it jumps out of your radio or iPod. 'It sounds more like somebody padding on a piece of leather or something like that,' Ludwig says. 'It really no longer sounds like a snare drum with a very sharp attack,' Ludwig says. The video uses Paul McCartney's 1989 song 'Figure of Eight' as an example, comparing its original recording with what a modern engineer might do with it. For more than 40 years, he's been the final ear in the audio chain for albums running from Jimi Hendrix to Radiohead, from Tony Bennett to Kronos Quartet.īob pointed to a YouTube video titled The Loudness War. More on that in a minute.īut first, host Robert Siegel talked to Bob Ludwig, a record mastering engineer. There's actually another kind of compression going on today - one that allows us to carry hundreds of songs in our iPods. We're talking about compression here, the dynamic compression that's used a lot in popular music. See The Entire Poster (And Zoom In) As A PDFĪs we come to the end of the decade, we turn to one of the more dramatic changes we've heard in music over those 10 years: It seems to have gotten louder.

Soundwaves of music