Just remember I tipped you off about this before...
The "Loudness Wars", remember those?  Still going on, too.

The latest chapter: Metallica's Death Magnetic.  Hailed by some as a return to form after the palette-cleansing and somewhat confounding St. Anger, the record is mired in controversy. Namely, that it's had the life squashed out of it using extreme compression to make it "appear" significantly loud(er).

Fans complained that the record sounded distorted and just plain awful on its release, prompting nothing less than a full on recall of the record. The mastering engineer even responded to complaints online to basically "wasn't me" and blamed it on the final mix of the record, pretty much the jurisdiction of Metallica and producer Rick Rubin.

This probably would've stopped there, filed under "you can't please all the people all of the time".  But due to a product tie-in with Guitar Hero Metallica made the entire album available in the game.  The odd thing is, the game version is NOT decimated with extreme mastering, and is hailed by many as the far superior version.  So now everyone is in a tizzy.

I don't have screen caps of both versions, I'm just listening to the record for the first time as I write this, but here's a little example one of my peers cooked up.  This is an analysis of the sound from Death Magnetic and another from Master of Puppets.  Notice anything odd?


And yes, the new record is the bottom green/red waveform.  Wooo!  Talk about crunched to the wall.  Apparently the Guitar Hero version and the CD version of the record differ by as much as 10 decibels.  For those in audio, we're talking a significant difference.

Oh, here we go, same song, different versions:


Sheesh man, that's practically white noise!

What's interesting about this is that even Yahoo! picked it up.  Slowly this phenomenon is starting to get notice.  I suspect it's that we are listening to music more and more on portable devices, with the speakers right up against our eardrums.  Suddenly all that tiring sonic assault isn't as pleasing anymore.  This is also why this topic fascinates me, because as an older guy my ears are slightly damaged, and I can't handle full concert volume for a whole concert anymore.  Heck, we drive a Jeep and when the top is down I can't even handle the highway (highways are LOUD). And when I listen to music I want to be able to appreciate the dynamic ebb and flow. 

I think what the loudness wars have done is remove the aesthetic pleasure of putting on a record and listening and instead made it a blunt-force-trauma commercial marketing on my ears.  This might've been an okay idea in regards to radio (which is already so heavily compressed as to be unnecessary... and no actually is NOT an okay idea), but for the home hi-fi or iPod device is a horrible idea.

Personally, I want people to rediscover the album as a work of art, so I'm not down with the loudness, yo. 

But, oh LOOK, I'm not alone!

Charles Dye, a great mixing engineer and overall sound critic, has helped form a loose organization/movement to champion to return of dynamics to music.  Turn Me Up! is "a non-profit music industry organization campaigning to give artists back the choice to release more dynamic records."  Uh.... awesome! (I have no idea what it means but it's awesome anyway I reckon).

And as we round the final corner for a few records here in our extended family, I'm confident you'll receive a dynamic listening experience.  Okay, enough soap-boxing for me today...

Next time: audio samples of something!  Promise.

EDIT: UPDATE
Yes, it's official, after five tracks I'm totally exhausted.  This record is pummeling in the worst way.