Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

Anyhow that's my theory

1. Compressed sound can be an integral (wanted) part of different genre aesthetics. I personally love dynamic mixes, but if you let your customers A/B mixes they will often chose the more compressed/louder one. If your song sounds weak after another bands song, that is an issue.

2. For reasons of health/liability there are maximum levels on headphones and mobile playback devices. That means if my mix has a high dynamic range the bulk of it may really just be too low when played back on the majority of headphones. If I mix my own music this is a bargain I can make if I mix other peoples music I would try to be a little more on the cautious side if the musicians didn't demand a highly dynamic mix.

3. Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music. 90% of people who listen to music do not listen to it actively, they just let it run in the background or are passively exposed to it. Try listening to a good dynamic recording of Beethovens fith in your car with the window rolled down. You will hear some strong phrases then inbetween nothing as it is below the ambient noise floor.

Vinyl has the benefit, that I as the mixing engineer can assume that the listener will be much more likely actively involved with the music than say in a radio mix.

In the open metadata world there is ReplayGain which analyzes music peaks and tries to create a negative gain to equalize the dynamic range to a standard volume at both the individual track and full album level.

Apple Music, Spotify, and others have proprietary but similar systems.

(As someone who deeply loves to shuffle an entire library, having a music player that supports ReplayGain has long been a personal requirement.)

If you just amplify the whole track until its max amplitude reaches the medium's maximum, yes you could undo that.

But the loudness war aims to make the whole track even louder than that, by quietening those max peaks so they don't clip, then that gives you room to amplify the rest of the track even further. The dynamic range of the recording is permanently reduced.

Is that really true? Anybody buying music today instead of streaming is somebody who takes music more seriously than most. It seems likely they're going to care more about sound quality than the streaming audience.

I suspect you’re not involved in contemporary record making. Like it or not, clipping is a technique and a color that producers, mixers, and mastering engineers all choose to impart for aesthetic and technical reasons. It has it’s uses.

If your proposal were passed all that would be left for consideration would be a handful lame DSD jazz records from those hi-fi enthusiasts who are disconnected from the reality around how most records are made these days.