Music engineers are starting a campaign against peak limiting, the practice where music is mastered so that the quiet bits are effectively pumped out, resulting in tracks sounding either "punchy" or "flat, loud, distorted and rubbish", depending on your point of view.
I say "launching a campaign", it seems to be more grumbling about it to The Times, but every campaign starts somewhere.
Peter Mew, senior mastering engineer at Abbey Road studios, said: “Record companies are competing in an arms race to make their album sound the ‘loudest’. The quieter parts are becoming louder and the loudest parts are just becoming a buzz.”
[...]
“The brain is not geared to accept buzzing. The CDs induce a sense of fatigue in the listeners. It becomes psychologically tiring and almost impossible to listen to. This could be the reason why CD sales are in a slump.”
The record companies? Surprisingly, they don't see a problem, some cheerfully admitting they release records with sound mangled so that it that it can be heard above background chatter in pubs or above car engines:
Domino, Arctic Monkeys’ record company, defended its band’s use of compression on their chart-topping albums, as a way of making their music sound “impactful”.
Because Alex's word play and the band's skills as musicians, presumably, fall short?
Bob Dylan has also said something about this - or "joined the campaign", apparently:
Bob Dylan has joined the campaign for a return to musical dynamics. He told Rolling Stone magazine: “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.”
Although with the way his voice sounds these days, you'd think he'd welcome this development.
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