The race for more loudness is one of the most (if not the most) important things that makes the sound harsh, distorted, squashed and tired. This huge issue starts from the belief that louder means better. Despite the validity of this affirmation in the end is the music who ends suffering the consequences, so, before digging into formulas, maths and numbers let's take a look at the social environment that surrounds this matter.


I. What happended at home?

One of the most influential things throught 20th and 21st centuries is the so called 'American Muscle' which equates size and strength with good quality, american cars are a very explicit example, its counterpart in sound and music was the big-sized playback systems with big apmplifiers, big speakers and big chassises. Ironically in this case more quality almost always requires more size.


As you surely know sound travels in form of sine waves through the matter, but despite the graphs in the books sound waves (as almost every kind of wave) is not a plain line but a sphere, which makes sound omnidirectional, in other words it travels in every direction from the source. The size of this sound sphere is proportional to the size of the speaker; let's connect these with the rest of the article:


Japanese are innovative people by nature and sometimes by pure need, that is the case of size, because of their lack of space, they are the masters of mini-everything. they were the authors of the first mini-components which gather everything you need to playback any commercial media in a tiny little package. The only thing is that there were no room for a large amp stage and neither for large speakers and yet the avergae consumer expected if not the same something close in terms of output volume.


The results are simple: if you choose say 10 watts of power a large playback system and a mini-player are able to give you that kind of power but the sphere of sound waves that produce each one are totally different, the one coming from the large playback system comes from a better amp stage and bigger speakers and is, of course, bigger and with a more complete frequency response, this sphere surrounds us a lot more and lets us listen more detail in the sound, the other system delivers a smaller sphere that comes from a smaller amp stage and smaller speakers so the sphere doesn't surround us that well, we lose detail and as relfex we go and turn up the volume knob, but as we increase gain the sound starts to lose playback quality and we ended up using more than the 10 watts set at first, it is just a physical issue.

Besides the technical reasons why older recordings sound lower one of the most important and many times forgoten reasons was that consumers didn't complain because they had those large systems at home and with a record at low volume they only had to turn up the knob and problem solved! Today that is much more difficult because we don't have those large systems, in fact is kind of a sign of status if you have a smaller and more modern player than your neighbor, also the fast track times we live in makes the world much louder and our attention more diverted into 5 or 6 things at the same time so the only thing that makes music more competitive with these is loudness.


So, due to the lack of an efficient and reliable amp stage the solution has been to increase loudness to the recorded signal instead of leaving it with a reasonable volume and let the listener to turn up him/herself. The most common way to achieve this loudness without clipping is by compressing the signal. This has become a backfire because everyone wants to sound louder than the others and with arrivals of tools like normalization you can go even further without clipping and without noticing the damage you are inflecting to the sound. Making recordings louder makes you think it makes them better and more sellable, while this is not exactly untrue in terms of selling, it is completely true that louder doesn't mean better, see for instance records like Maroon 5's 'Songs About Jane', RCHP's 'Californication' or Audioslave's 'Audioslave' which sound awful and the music is great. They sound harsh, squashed, distorted and are very tired but you play records like Alanis Morisette's 'Jagged little Pill' or Metallica's 'Black Album' they don't sound that louder and they have sold almost the same than the others.


As you can see this loudness wars have more to do with soiciety than with software and hardware capabilities to achieve more loudness.

Eight years of this 21st century and we are shallower than ever, we all say that the 80's where ruled by glamour and fashion and that's true but at that time people accepted and lived with it, today things are worse because we think we are not, we go to a museum full of junk that need a wall of explanation to become art and we then feel intelectual because we saw something that someone with a college degree told us that was art.
Today is when we don't go to common sense to see that an mp3 will NEVER sound with CD quality for the simple reason that it is 10 times less the size of its original audio file and we fill our iPod with tons of music in a file format that sounds like hell and we feel like we have the best of hi-tech in our hands, Since when better technology involves 10 times less sound quality? This happens also in DVD wich also uses compression in sound and image and who cares about quality?