I’ve wittered on before now about the Loudness Wars and I’ve repeatedly whined about a couple of albums in particular: Hard-Fi’s Stars of CCTV and Metallica’s Death Magnetic for being particularly poor examples of how to ruin an album which could have been excellent by wringing the life out of it.

Both recordings were deliberately compressed: we’re not talking about bitrate compression like MP3 here, but dynamic range compression. This squeezes the quiet and the loud bits of the music together, making the overall sound louder (because there’s less quiet), but in doing so it robs the sound of some of the, well, dynamics. This makes things sound lifeless, and taken to extremes (like Death Magnetic) means that before whatever distortion your equipment adds, the sound is already distorted because it is clipping (hitting the maximum range of the recording or playback equipment).

Listen to Stars of CCTV and the drums sound lifeless and flat. At least they had the excuse of being musicians, not engineers or producers, and not having a ton of cash, while Metallica just did it for the lolz, making a CD that I have only listened to once because it’s painful.

As this is one of my pet subjects, I was gratified to find the Dynamic Range Database, a site listing lots of albums against dynamic range measurements. No surprise, on a scale of 1-14, with 14 being good, Stars of CCTV scores a paltry 5 overall and a maximum of 8, Death Magnetic managing 3 with a maximum of 4.

By comparison, Metallica’s “Black Album” manages 11 with a maximum of 12 (and sounds great). Yesterwynde, which I was raving about last year, manages an average of 8, and a max of 12, 8 being rated as acceptable for rock. Disappointingly below this level are a few favorites like Darkest White and Within Temptation’s Hydra, which also received complaints at the time. By comparison, some favorites score highly, So scoring a minimum of 11 for the original release, though some later ones have sufferred.

There are valid reasons why dynamic range might be compressed- sometimes, like with TV adverts, it’s deliberate to make the advert (or song) stand out. Sometimes it’s to tailor sound for the expected playback device or audience: a cheap radio literally cannot cope with a high dynamic range as the quiet bits will disappear and the loud bits distort: hence chart pop music is often heavily compressed to fit commercial radio and Alexa and so it doesn’t disappear against it’s competitors.

The good news is that the worst abuses of this have gone, with the peak being around the launch of Stars of CCTV in 2005. There’s been a bit of a backlash, though that hasn’t made Metallica release an un-fucked Death Magnetic, apart from the version in Guitar Hero, but it’s such a shame to deliberately compromise recordings so badly.