Why modern music sounds rubbish A few year ago Bob Dylan echoed a complaint that many of you share with me from time to time: music sounds rubbish. Dylan hates recording these days, because the outcome is too loud and it's too bright. As he said: "You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of …
I listen to music for possibly the majority of my waking life, and for that part of it over which I'm in control of the dials, I honestly can't come up with one scenario in which it isn't *necessary* to normalise the loudness, be it in order to be consistently audible over background noise, or to avoid pissing the neighbours off with the louder bits. (And I refuse to sit in my house wearing headphones, that's just wanky.) I guess some people are luckier :(
In fewer years that most want to consider, most of today's loud "music lovers" will be essentially deaf and the process will start all over again with softer music. Revenge of a sort on those who keep plugs in the ears and loudness at max. I just laugh ... "the times they are a changin' " BD is right in more ways than one.
That does explain why BBC Radio 3's newsreaders are so much quieter than Radio 4's: I'm guessing that R4 is compressed simply because it's mostly speech, in a fairly small volume range). It does make R3 news sound peculiarly personal, though (it's the delivery, not just the volume). It's "I say old thing, have you heard..." vs "HERE IS THE NEWS".
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