Loudness is not the volume, but the average amplitude of the the sound wave.
When you hear music, there are things like drum hits that stick out for an instant, or the singer saying a T or P sound in a word. These are the peak sounds of a sound wave, that occur for such a short period of time they aren't really notice by your ears/brain.
Your ears and brain basically hear the average volume of everything coming at them. Getting a louder recording has always bee a goal for the msuci industry, the simple idea being make your record louder on the juke box and it will be noticed. But the analog medium only allows so much of this, so it's not something that really changes the way you percieve the recording, it just makes it stand out or "pop" in a pleasant way.
In the digital age, with the meters showing all peak information I mentioned above, and tools that allow for WAY more compression what happened is that they were able to squash those peaks to be equal to the average information, there is no peak. Then you can crank the signal up to the max level allowed and your average level is now much higher than it ever could be before. But what happens is that it sounds unnatural. If someone were to scream right in your ear, there would be no peak information either, and you'd get a headache from fatigue. This is what happens when you listen to an entire album that is recorded in this loud manner. There are no dynamics (no a soft part of a song, but dynamics of the mix).
Wikipedia has a good article about it.
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en.wikipedia.org]
You can see how the soundwave is squashed.
This youtube video is a simple explanation of the process also-
This is why I will not buy the UMG remasters. They squashed the stones to make them loud like modern music. This is how a bigger bang was made also. The CBS or Virgin issues came out before this loudness war took off, so they both are closer to the original soundwave.
The final step in the loudness wars is that some recordings are pushed even past the maximum level. They intentionally clip those peaks because that distortion is perceived louder to the ears. Now people try to undo the clipping with more software, you can find many modern releases on the internet where someone has "declipped" the recording. There is a bigger bang version out there somewhere like this. When analog tape, tube preamps, etc. were pushed to clipping, it is not nearly as harsh. Analog equipment distorts gradually, so the wave form might be changed, but only slightly, and some of those changes are even appealing, hence tube guitar amp distortion channels. Digital audio clips 100% instantly, so a sine wave turns into a square wave, and sounds harsh and very different from the original.
Sorry for the length.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2012-07-27 16:33 by neylon79.