Have you noticed some of your CDs sound terrible? Welcome to the loudness wars. Modern mastering is sucking the life out of music.

'The phrase loudness war (or loudness race) refers to the music industry's tendency to record, produce and broadcast music at progressively increasing levels of loudness to create a sound that stands out from others.

However, as the maximum amplitude of a CD is at a fixed level, the overall loudness can only be increased by reducing the dynamic range. This is done by pushing the lower level program material higher while the loudest peak sounds are either destroyed or severely diminished. Certain extreme uses of compression can cause distorting or clipping the waveform of the recording.'

The trend of increasing loudness as shown by the waveform image of a song mastered on CD four times since 1983.

 "With all the technical innovation, music sounds worse," says Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, who has made what are considered some of the best-sounding records of all time. "God is in the details. But there are no details anymore."

Sound familiar? Read on:

• http://www.austin360.com/music/content/music/stories/xl/2006/09/28cover.html 

'The Death of High Fidelity' is another good article, from Rolling Stone, of all places...

• http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17777619/the_death_of_high_fidelity/print 

 And another excellent article called The Death of Dynamic Range

• http://www.cdmasteringservices.com/dynamicdeath.htm 

Wikipedia has a good article  on the loudness wars:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war 

If the Loudness War struck the art world...

• http://recforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/mv/msg/4286/0/0/0/