Recording Execs: White Noise Is NOT Music!

Remember when you were rocking out to your favorite song and your dad yelled at you, "Turn that noise down! ..... NOW!"

I think you should read this...

Actually I think anyone interested in popular music today should read this, it's a little on the technical side to some degree but the visual examples are quite clear.

Ever wonder why a lot today's music sound like a wash of noise. Why recordings don't have any punch to them anymore? Digital audio gives us a lot more headroom to work with then analog, where did it all go? Well this article, Over the Limit lays it all out for us. Audio Engineers are being forced to squash the signal flat and then crank it up to fill all the headroom available on CD. It's like one person put it, compare these badly mastered recordings to a picture that is overexposed and has no contrast. A big mess and not pleasant to look at. All washed out. Totally uninteresting to look at, and you would probably get upset if all your pictures turned out that way. A lot of things fall out of fashion and I hope the washed out sound does so soon...

This is something that audio engineers have been fighting for a while (from what I have read), but you know it's getting really bad when you turn on the radio and find yourself suddenly bored because different bands, different songs all seem to have the same dynamic (akin to listening to a cooling fan--white noise).

Enough is enough!