I found a great article in Rolling Stone about the state of recording in popular music. You know it’s pretty bad when a crap magazine complains about sound quality.</p>
Excerpt</strong>: Full Article</a></p> Stereo designed by Dieter Rams >></strong></p>
“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.”</p>