Fighting the loudness war, one battle at a time

A small follow-up on the rant I concluded my Unknown Pleasures review with.

Ever heard of the loudness war? To make it simple, it's the practice of overusing dynamic range compression (reducing the volume difference between quiet and loud to raise the overall volume) for commercial purposes; for clubs, radios and cars and because tasteless consumers like it loud.

Note that I'm not talking about the use of such compression for artistic reasons (e.g. Hi-NRG/Eurobeat or Celtic Frost's Monotheist), only the Californications and Death Magnetics out there (hint: both produced by Rick Rubin).

From my experience, the problem indeed started around 1995 but unlike what is often said, it never really went away, at least when it comes to popular music. It just receded a little bit then simply became the new normal.

Anyway, today I replaced my ripped copy of Depeche Mode's Playing the Angel (2005) which was a known casualty of that war. An important job because it is my second favourite of their works, right after the legendary Black Celebration.

I used the same technique I already described and found the stereo layer on the hybrid SACD released at the same time much better! Here's a graphical comparison of two particularly "brickwalled" tracks using this ffmpeg_waveform script:

To be honest, it doesn't sound as bad as it looks but you can still easily hear the difference.

I shouldn't have to tell you that streaming peons better be happy with the only version they got, which seems to be this one with bonus track but no different (read: fixed) master…