Everything Louder Than Everything Else

[johnfoyle]

Someone on listserv highlighted this; very interesting reading!

http://www.austin360.com/music/content/ ... cover.html

XL Recording Studio Guide 2006

Everything Louder Than Everything Else

Have the loudness wars reached their final battle?
By Joe Gross
Monday, October 02, 2006

"You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like — static."

— Bob Dylan in Rolling Stone magazine

The ranting of a cranky old man? Perhaps.

One man's opinion? Hardly.

In August, an open letter from a music industry executive on the state of commercial compact disc mastering and manufacturing was sent to an industry tip sheet/e-mail list run by a music pundit named Bob Lefsetz.

The letter was written by Angelo Montrone, a vice president for A&R (the folks who scout and sign music acts) for One Haven Music, a Sony Music company.

"There's something . . . sinister in audio that is causing our listeners fatigue and even pain while trying to enjoy their favorite music. It has been propagated by A&R departments for the last eight years: The complete abuse of compression in mastering (forced on the mastering engineers against their will and better judgment)."

This compression thing has been a topic of discussion among audiophiles and music fans for nearly a decade. But hearing a music industry executive cop to it was pretty unusual.

The letter was almost immediately reprinted online in audio discussion forums.

"The mistaken belief that a 'super loud' record will sound better and magically turn a song into a hit has caused most major label releases in the past eight years to be an aural assault on the listener," Montrone's letter continued. "Have you ever heard one of those test tones on TV when the station is off the air? Notice how it becomes painfully annoying in a very short time? That's essentially what you do to a song when you super compress it. You eliminate all dynamics."

For those already confused, Montrone was essentially saying that there are millions of copies of CDs being released that are physically exhausting listeners, most of whom probably don't know why their ears and brains are feeling worn out.

He continued, citing an album that proved very popular with Austinites.

"Just to prove that the 'super loud' record has no correlation to actual sales, when we mastered the first Los Lonely Boys record I went to the session and specifically told our mastering engineer NOT to make this a loud record. Could it be that a record that actually had dynamic range could compete? Two and a half million records and a year of constant airplay of 'Heaven' confirmed my suspicion. Loud records are for the birds."

Loud records? Can't you just turn it down? Well, yes and no.

Let's say you go to the store to buy a CD, a brand-new CD of a popular rock band. The group is your favorite, you've been looking forward to this CD for some time. You have the band's other recordings, you've seen them live, perhaps you've even heard the new songs once or twice at a show.

You buy the CD. You take it home and throw it in the CD player. You couldn't be more excited as it starts to play.

But something weird happens as you listen to it. You like the songs, but you don't really want to listen to it for very long and you're not entirely sure why. You take it off. A few minutes, later you put it back on. Same thing happens: You like the music, but you still want to take the CD off. It's more than a little weird.

Condolences. You are officially a casualty of the loudness wars, the ongoing competition among bands, labels and A&R folks to make ever-louder albums.

• •

Artists, recording engineers and record companies have been trying to make the loudest possible record since the dawn of 78 rpm technology back in the early 20th century.

When 33 1/3 rpm and 45 rpm became the industry standard, engineers strove to make those records as loud as possible as well, often using something called compression during the mastering stage.

Compression means squeezing the dynamic range of an audio signal, usually to boost the perceived volume of a song or performance. Compression works on recorded music the way MSG works on food: It makes everything sound more more. Used with discretion in the recording stage (and even in the mastering stage) it's an invaluable tool for recording engineers.

The idea was the greater the perceived volume of the record, the more attractive the sound would be to the listener. Which meant more attractive to potential DJs, which meant more airplay, more exposure and more sales of the record.

But there were literal physical limitations to this process when vinyl was the primary recording medium — the music's dynamic range was naturally restricted by the medium itself. During mastering, you could only compress so far; if the sounds were too extreme, the needle would pop out of the groove.

With the advent of compact disc technology in the early 1980s, almost all of this went out the window, as CDs lacked the physical limitations of vinyl.

In theory, this was a good thing. The dynamic range of CDs was far larger than vinyl, and could closer replicate the highs and lows of actual performance. But something else happened.

For the past 10 or so years, artists and record companies have been increasing the overall loudness of pop and rock albums, using ever increasing degrees of compression during mastering, altering the properties of the music being recorded. Quiet sounds and loud sounds are now squashed together, decreasing the recording's dynamic range, raising the average loudness as much as possible.

As Jerry Tubb at Austin's Terra Nova Mastering puts it, "Listening to something that's mastered too hot is like sitting in the front row at the movies. All the images are in your face."

This is why the reissued X album 'Los Angeles' (see story at right) sounds louder at the same volume as the old version, why you turn the 2005 X album down and still hear music, parts that are supposed to be quieter and louder, up front and buried in the mix, at the same time.

For some of you, this difference might be hard to notice at first. Consider yourselves lucky. For some of us, hearing this sort of mastering is like seeing the goblet between two faces in that classic optical illusion — once you perceive it, you can't unperceive it. Soon, it's all you can see — or hear.

• •

Erik Wofford is a producer and mastering engineer in Austin at Cacophony Recorders. He's worked on albums by such local bands as Explosions in the Sky, Zykos and Voxtrot, and finds the loudness wars exhausting to deal with.

"Over-compressing stuff gives everything a flatness," he says. "If loud sounds are the same as quiet sounds, you've destroyed any excitement or natural dynamics that the band creates."

We're sitting with Wofford in Bruce Robison's Premium Recording Service studio, listening to various CDs old and new, running them though the ProTools computer software and looking at their relative loudness. The studio has a woody, '70s vibe. You can totally see Fleetwood Mac recording here (which seems fitting for a man related to the Dixie Chicks). It seems a weirdly inappropriate place to talk about the limitations of modern pop music.

We're looking at the wave forms generated by a number of modern albums. Sound waves should look like what they're called: waves, with sharp peaks and valleys. But the music we're looking at is all peak. It's like looking at a butte or a brick.

"These square waves are a very unnatural occurrence," Wofford says. "It sounds wrong to the ear. You can't hear detail."

There are all sorts of metrics usable to measure loudness, but the Root Mean Squared (RMS) number is a reasonably useful one. It's a measure of average sound level. A smaller RMS number means higher average level; i.e., minus 10 dB RMS is 2 dB louder than minus 12 dB. The maximum RMS value is zero.

Here's the weird part. In the early to late '80s, most pop records averaged around minus 15. (The peak level we see for the old version of "Los Angeles" is minus 14.4 dB RMS.)

Now, modern CDs average at around minus 12 to minus 9 dB. Average.

When a soundwave squares off, something called "clipping" can occur. Clipping in the digital realm means digital distortion, which different CD players handle different ways. Some just won't play that frequency, resulting in loss of dynamic range (you're literally not hearing the whole song). Some digitally distort, which is quite an unpleasant, static-like sound indeed. Some really old CD players skip the song entirely.

There's plenty of clipping on the contemporary songs Wofford and I look at; a red light goes on and stays on the screen when a song clips. Christina Aguilera. Red Hot Chili Peppers. Mastodon. Brick, brick, brick. Clip, clip, clip.

Wofford sighs. "Clipping should just be forbidden," he says. "You used not to be able to turn a redbook CD (the CD from which all others are made) into a manufacturer with clipping on it. That's not true any more."

Thanks to folks on the Internet, there are lists of famously loud CDs. The Red Hot Chili Pepper's 1999 album "Californication" is a notorious example. It clips constantly, and the title track peaks at a whopping minus 5.6 dB, which was really uncomfortable for almost everybody.

That Los Lonely Boys CD Montrone was so proud of? The song "Heaven" averages at around minus 12.5 dB, and peaks at minus 8.9, completely reasonable for modern records.

But the song "Diamonds," on the band's new album "Sacred," clips throughout, averaging at about minus 8.9 dB, peaking at minus 7.7 db RMS.

"I wasn't able to go to that mastering session for the second one," Montrone says from his New York office. "The first record came out when I was with Or Music (the label that released the first Los Lonely Boys album before being acquired by Sony). I wasn't as involved with this new one. I wish I had been."

Who knows if consumers are sick of the band, or the songwriting isn't up to snuff or it has something to do with that louder sound, but "Sacred" thus far has sold about 185,000 copies, and continues to drop on the Billboard albums chart.

• •

So why aren't more people noticing this sort of thing? One word:

lifestyle.

We listen to music in completely different ways than we did 20 or 30 years ago. For most people, music is listened to on the go, in cars, on headphones while running, on computers at work. Music has to compete with the sound of your car's engine, has to punch through the background noise of street traffic or a loud office.

"Ours is a culture of competition," Wofford says. "Maybe labels think the music has to be super aggressive, super bright, like a kid screaming in a supermarket, to get your attention."

The idea is that louder recordings automatically sound better on low-quality reproduction systems, but this isn't really true in practice. MP3 players such as iPods have their own compressors and limiters, further reducing the dynamic range of recordings, as do computers. A CD doesn't have to be mastered loud; the iPod can make it as loud as everything else it plays.

This is especially true of radio, which, in order to make sure that every song played has a uniform loudness, uses its own compressors and limiters. The idea that a sound has to be mastered loud to be noticed on the radio is just false.

"It's a myth," Tubb says. "Actually, a really loud CD might sound worse on the radio after being fed through a station's processors. (This is what Montrone was talking about with "Heaven.")

This is why the Christina Aguilera song "Ain't No Other Man" (average RMS: about minus 8.4, peak: minus 6.3), which sounds OK-to-irritating on the radio or an iPod, sounds like you are being punched in the face on a real stereo system.

• •

Yet, bands keep asking for it. That rustling you hear is the mastering community shrugging its shoulders.

"Ours is a service business," Tubb says. "If that's what the client wants, I try to explain the trade-offs in clarity. In reality, we're just trying to accommodate requests from labels or A&R guys or the artists themselves. They'll walk in with a handful of CDs and say, 'I want it to be as loud as this one.' The last five years it's gone absolutely mad."

"Ask any mastering engineer which they prefer," Wofford says, "Something that's super-compressed or not compressed. But they keep their mouths shut about it if they want to keep working."

"It becomes part of (a mastering engineer's) reputation," Montrone says. "Suddenly, you become known for your really loud records. Unless you specify that you don't want it to be loud, they just make it loud. It's become the standard now.

"And it's infected other steps in the chain," Montrone continues.

Mixing engineers often make spec mixes of songs to try and win the bid to mix a particular song or album. "Mixing engineers will turn in spec mixes of tracks that they just slam the heck out of because they think that will get them the gig," Montrone says. "And they're not wrong."

So we're at the chicken-or-egg stage. Is it changing the way we listen to music, or because the way we are listening to music has changed?

• •

Here's the punch line: The brain can't process sounds that lack a dynamic range for very long. It's an almost subconscious response. This is what Montrone was talking about when he mentioned the TV test tone.

"It's ear fatigue," Tubbs says, "After three songs you take it off. There's no play to give your ears even a few milliseconds of depth and rest."

Alan Bean is a recording/mastering engineer in Harrison, Maine. He's a former professional musician and a doctor of occupational medicine.

"It stinks that this has happened," he says. "Our brains just can't handle hearing high average levels of anything very long, whereas we can stand very loud passages, as long as it is not constant. It's the lack of soft that fatigues the human ear."

This is part of the reason that some people are really fanatical about vinyl. "It's not necessarily that vinyl sounds 'better,' " Bean says. "It's that it's impossible for vinyl to be fatiguing."

And yet, record companies wonder why consumers are buying less of them.

"I definitely think it's a contributing factor," Montrone says. "People have a lot of entertainment options. If listening to music is not a highly enjoyable experience, we're just giving people another reason not to purchase the stuff."

Of course, that's the weird part: Consumers may not know why they are buying fewer CDs or listening to them less or are perfectly happy with low-def MP3s from the Internet.

"That's the big 'too bad' about all this," Bean says: The music is not necessarily at fault.

• •

The story of popular music is a materialist one — as playback technology has changed, so has the music.

The LP could hold about 50 minutes of sound (25 minutes a side) if you really squashed the grooves together. As a result, most albums came in at about 40 to 45 minutes. CDs can hold about 80 minutes of sound, and artists have filled them up; the majority of major label pop CDs are an hour or more. The rule seems to be, if you can do it, you should do it.

So it is with mastering: We can make it incredibly loud, so we should make it incredibly loud. Though there is talk in the mastering community of universal mastering standards, it's still just talk.

Again, there is, of course, an element of subjectivity to all this. It is entirely possible that anyone younger than 18 reading this has no idea what we're talking about. They may not bother to buy CDs anymore, such is the availability of MP3s single downloads. To them, popular music has always been hyper-compressed, square-wave stuff, able to punch through background noise with a single snare drum hit, clipping all over the place.

To them, one can say only: You don't know what you're missing.

X: A study in volume vs. loudness

Without getting technical, it's probably important here to define the difference, for our purposes, between "loudness" and "volume." (It's also important to recall that this all gets very relative very fast and that many would argue that there are few true absolutes involved.)

When we talk here about volume, we're talking about the thing which you can control with the knob on your stereo or iPod or boombox.

When we talk here about loudness, we're talking about your perception of a sound at any particular volume.

For example, if you listen to the 1988 CD version of the album "Los Angeles" by the noted roots-punk band X, you have to turn it up to a certain volume to enjoy it. Turn it down low and much of the music vanishes, which is what you might expect when you turn something down.

Now listen to the 2005 CD remaster of the same album. At the same volume as the first version, the songs seem to jump out of the speakers more. The quiet sounds sound almost as loud as the guitar sounds. Turn it down, and you can still hear the quiet sounds almost as well as the louder sounds. This is because the CD has been remastered to bring it more in line with contemporary CDs, which are often mastered louder than ever.

As one employee at a local record store put it, "When we put in older CDs into the CD changer to play in the store, you can't even hear them."

Can't you turn it up?

"Not really," he said. "Because then the newer CDs would be incredibly loud at the new volume. So we don't even play older CDs in the store that often."
— Joe Gross

'If the loudness wars struck the art world'

On the Web site prosoundweb.com, Atlanta rock guitarist Lee Flier imagined a set of remastered masterpieces. Reflecting the sonic damage of pumping up the sound on modern CDs (lost subtleties at the high and low ends as everything gets louder in the middle), the original Mona Lisa and 'American Gothic' paintings become posterized cartoons of themselves. For examples, see Flier's posting at recforums.prosoundweb.com.

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926

[mood swung]

that's fascinating. So I'm NOT the old fart I thought I was.

[Bad Ambassador]

It's been going on for far too long. Luckily, it seems to happen less with alternative music because there isn't quite such a need to be loud as it's going to have less constant exposure. That said, the recent The Good, The Bad & The Queen album sounds bloody awful on CD. My CD copy was played once. I also have the vinyl, which is getting hammered. It's a great album, and while the mastering on the vinyl still isn't perfect, it's a lot better than the mashed up CD. Listen to the crackle on the start of 80s Life and Kingdom Of Doom and then the total bolloxing of the last couple of minutes of the title track. Yes, it's meant to sound chaotic, but not in such a clipped fashion. Hard to know if the record companies will ever stop.

[miss buenos aires]

After I read this, I immediately got a headache. I am highly suggestible in that way.

[mood swung]

I do that with vomit. I never let a friend, a child or a pet vomit alone.

[miss buenos aires]

I used to know someone who would vomit if you reminded him of the last time he vomited.

[johnfoyle]

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... and-footer

From The Times

November 16, 2007

Do the songs remain the same?

They’re remastered and rereleased - but does messing with Led Zep’s classics really make them sound any better? Our correspondent risks his delicate hearing to find out

Dominic Maxwell

Is Led Zeppelin’s new album, Mothership, a rip-off or a revelation? Released this week, the two-CD best-of heralds the Seventies rock gods’ live reunion with a track listing remarkably similar to their previous two-CD best-of. Remasters, released in 1990, sold in airshiploads, thanks to the acclaimed restoration work by the band’s guitarist, Jimmy Page. Seventeen years later, he has done it again, with a new remastering engineer. Has some 21st-century sonic hoodoo been applied to these blues-rock anthems? Are all previous versions of these songs now second-rate, redundant? Or is this remastering lark all just a bit of a gimmick?

Opinion, so far, is divided. The album is a must, argues Uncutmagazine, “for those who wish to hear Zep at their heaviest, deepest, softest and crispestâ€

[pophead2k]

Anyone who has converted their collection to their iPod and played it on shuffle can attest to the extreme volume differences in newer recordings. In some cases, older CDs were mastered at almost criminally low volumes (The Violent Femmes first album is one example, the Replacements entire catalog is another), but most new stuff is nearly twice as loud as that. I try to even out the ranges manually, but still find myself adjusting the volume on my player or in my car constantly.

[Mike Boom]

I dont mind loud, I LIKE loud, because thats how I listen to music anyway - BUT - in trying to make it as loud as possible they are actually distorting the music and overly compressing it so the soft bits are loud too - I mean - I could not listen to Oceans Apart, the Go Betweens album because it was so horribly distorted, it just gave me a headache. Great album - horrible mastering. Its really quite criminal.

[BlueChair]

Yeah, The Jayhawks' Rainy Day Music is also mixed way too loud, to the point that the vocals actually distort on songs that are supposed to be tender.

[johnfoyle]

http://cacaorock.blogspot.com/2007/12/h ... -dies.html

Rolling Stone issue 1042/1043 (Dec. 27, 2007 - Jan. 10, 2008)

The Death of High Fidelity

In the age of MP3s, sound quality is worse than ever
By Robert Levine

David Bendeth, a producer who works with rock bands like Hawthorne Heights and Paramore, knows that the albums he makes are often played through tiny computer speakers by fans who are busy surfing the Internet. So he's not surprised when record labels ask the mastering engineers who work on his CDs to crank up the sound levels so high that even the soft parts sound loud.

Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered - almost always for the worse. "They make it loud to get [listeners'] attention," Bendeth says. Engineers do that by applying dynamic range compression, which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a song. Like many of his peers, Bendeth believes that relying too much on this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power and leave listeners with what engineers call ear fatigue.

"I think most everything is mastered a little too loud," Bendeth says. "The industry decided that it's a volume contest." Producers and engineers call this "the loudness war," and it has changed the way almost every new pop and rock album sounds. But volume isn't the only issue. Computer programs like Pro Tools, which let audio engineers manipulate sound the way aword processor edits text, make musicians sound unnaturally perfect. And today's listeners consume an increasing amount of music on MP3, which eliminates much of the data from the original CD file and can leave music sounding tinny or hollow. "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."


THE IDEA THAT ENGINEERS make albums louder might seem strange: Isn't volume controlled by that knob on the stereo? Yes, but every setting on that dial delivers a range of loudness, from a hushed vocal to a kick drum - and pushing sounds toward the top of that range makes music seem louder. It's the same technique used to make television commercials stand out from shows. And it does grab listeners' attention - but at a price.

Last year, Bob Dylan told ROLLING STONE that modern albums "have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like - static." In 2004, Jeff Buckley's mom, Mary Guibert, listened to the original three-quarter-inch tape of her son's recordings as she
was preparing the tenth-anniversary reissue of Grace. "We were hearing instruments you've never heard on that album, like finger cymbals and the sound of viola strings being plucked," she remembers. "It blew me away because it was exactly what he heard in the studio."

To Guibert's disappointment, the remastered 2004 version failed to capture these details. So last year, when Guibert assembled the best-of collection So Real: Songs From Jeff Buckley, she insisted on an independentA&R consultant to oversee the reissue process and a mastering engineer who would reproduce the sound Buckley made in the studio. "You can hear the distinct instruments and the sound of the room," she says of the new release. "Compression smudges things together." Too much compression can be heard as musical clutter; on the Arctic Monkeys' debut, the band never seems to pause to catch its breath. By maintaining constant intensity, the album flattens out the emotional peaks that usually stand out in a song. "You lose the power of the chorus, because it's not louder than the verses," Bendeth says. "You lose emotion."

The inner ear automatically compresses blasts of high volume to protect itself, so we associate compression with loudness, says Daniel Levitin, a professor of music and neuroscience at McGill University and author of 'This Is Your Brain on Music: 'The Science of a Human Obsession.' Human brains have evolved to pay particular attention to loud nQises, so compressed sounds initially seem more exciting. But the effect doesn't last. "The excitement in music comes from variation in rhythm, timbre, pitch and loudness," Levitin says. "If you hold one of those constant, it can seem monotonous." After a few minutes, research shows, constant loudness grows fatiguing to the brain. Though few listeners realize this consciously, many feel an urge to skip to another song. "If you limit range, it's just an assault on the body," says Tom Coyne, a mastering engineer who has worked with Mary J. Blige and Nas. "When you're fifteen, it's the greatest thing - you're being hammered. But do you want that on a whole album?"

To an average listener, a wide dynamic range creates a sense of spaciousness and makes it easier to pick out individual instruments - as you can hear on recent albums such as Dylan's Modern Times and Norah Jones' Not Too Late. "When people have the courage and the vision to do a record that way, it sets them apart," says Joe Boyd, who produced albums by Richard Thompson and R.E.M.'s Fables of the Reconstruction. "It sounds warm, it sounds three-dimensional, it sounds different. Analog sound to me is more emotionally affecting."


ROCK AND POP PRODUCERS have always used compression to balance the sounds of different instruments and to make music sound more exciting, and radio stations apply compression for technical reasons. In the days of vinyl records, there was a physical limit to how high the bass levels could go before the needle skipped a groove. CDs can handle higher levels of loudness, although they, too, have a limit that engineers call "digital zero dB," above which sounds begin to distort. Pop albums rarely got close to the zero-dB mark until the mid- I990S, when digital compressors and limiters, which cut off the peaks of sound waves, made it easier to manipulate loudness levels. Intensely compressed albums like Oasis' I995 (What's the Story) Morning Glory? set a new bar for loudness; the songs were well-suited for bars, cars and other noisy environments.

"In the Seventies and Eighties, you were expected to pay attention," says Matt Serletic, the former chief executive of Virgin Records USA, who also produced albums by Matchbox Twenty and Collective Soul. "Modern music should be able to get your attention." Adds Rob Cavallo, who produced Green Day's American Idiot and My Chemical Romance's The Blac~ Parade, "It's a style that started postgrunge, to get that intensity. The idea was to slam someone's face against the wall. You can set your CD to stun." It's not just new music that's too loud. Many remastered recordings suffer the same problem as engineers apply compression to bring them into line with modern tastes. The new Led Zeppelin collection, Mothership, is louder than the band's original albums, and Bendeth, who mixed Elvis Presley's 30 #I Hits, says that the album was mastered too loud for his taste. "A lot of audiophiles hate that record," he says, "but people can play it in the car and it's competitive with the new Foo Fighters record."


JUST AS CDS SUPPLANTED vinyl and cassettes, MP3 and other digital-music formats are quickly replacing CDs as the most popular way to listen to music. That means more convenience but worse sound. To create an MP3, a computer samples the music on a CD and compresses it into a smaller file by excluding the musical information that the human ear is less likely to notice.

Much of the information left out is at the very high and low ends, which is why some MP3s sound flat. Cavallo says that MP3S don't reproduce reverb well, and the lack of high-end detail makes them sound brittle. Without enough low end, he says, "you don't get the punch anymore. It decreases the punch of the kick drum and how the speaker gets pushed when the guitarist plays a power chord." But not all digital music files are created equal. Levitin says that most people find MP3s ripped at a rate above 224 kbps virtually indistinguishable from CDs. (iTunes sells music as either 128 or 256 kbps AAC files -AAC is slightly superior to MP3 at an equivalent bit rate. Amazon sells MP3s at 256 kbps.) Still, "it's like going to the Louvre and instead of the Mona Lisa there's a 10 megapixel image of it," he says. "I always want to listen to music the way the artists wanted me to hear it. I wouldn't look at a Kandinsky painting with sunglasses on."

Producers also now alter the way they mix albums to compensate for the limitations of MP3 sound. "You have to be aware of how people will hear music, and pretty much everyone is listening to MP3," says producer Butch Vig, a member of Garbage and the producer of Nirvana's Nevermind. "Some of the effects get lost. So you sometimes have to over-exaggerate things." Other producers believe that intensely compressed CDs make for better MP3s, since the loudness of the music will compensate for the flatness of the digital format. As technological shifts have changed the way sounds are recorded, they have encouraged an artificial perfection in music itself. Analog tape has been replaced in most studios by Pro Tools, making edits that once required splicing tape together easily done with the click of a mouse. Programs like Auto-Tune can make weak singers sound pitch-perfect, and Beat Detective does the same thing for wobbly drummers.

"You can make anyone sound professional," says Mitchell Froom, a producer who's worked with Elvis Costello and Los Lobos, among others. "But the problem is that you have something that's professional, but it's not distinctive. I was talking to a session drummer, and I said, 'When's the last time you could tell who the drummer is?' You can tell Keith Moon or John Bonham, but now they all sound the same."

SO IS MUSIC DOOMED TO keep sounding worse? Awareness of the problem is growing. The South by Southwest music festival recently featured a panel titled "Why Does Today's Music Sound Like Shit?" In August, a group of producers and engineers founded an organization called Turn Me Up!, which proposes to put stickers on CDs that meet high sonic standards. But even most CD listeners have lost interest in high-end stereos as surround-sound home theater systems have become more popular, and superior-quality disc formats like DVD-Audio and SACD flopped. Bendeth and other producers worry that young listeners have grown so used to dynamically compressed music and the thin sound of MP3s that the battle has already been lost. "CDs sound better, but no one's buying them," he says. "The age of the audiophile is over."