What is this thing called the Loudness War?
To talk about the Loudness War, we have to elaborate what Loudness is first. Loudness might sound like the parameter you influence by adjusting the volume knob on your audio system, but it is actually more complicated than that.
Considering a waveform, a regular volume knob raises or lowers all the parts of the signal. This means that, in the case of an increase, the higher peaks become higher and the lower peaks also become higher. The overall sound gets louder. A lot of the arguments against the Loudness war use this logic to claim that the loudness war is non-existent. Because, if the music is too loud, you can just turn down the volume.
Actually, this is not the case. The classic volume knob is a post-production way to alter the perceived loudness. However, the parameter that is Loudness that is used during mastering and is discussed here focusses on the dynamic range of a song. The dynamic range is the difference between the lowest and the highest peak of an audio signal. You can see this visualized above.
The dynamic range is influenced by any act in the production process, by mixing techniques like equalizing or compression and by digital conversion. Besides that, it is limited at a level of 0dB. Audio signals take place in the minus world and raise to a level of 0 when they get louder. 0 dB has been determined as the maximum audio signal that digital systems can handle. This has been done according to terribly complicated calculations that deserve their own elaborate explanation. For now, we will leave it at that. Important to know is that any audio signal that does exceed the level of 0dB starts ‘clipping’. Also, it's crucial to understand that there are different ways of measuring dB. LUFS (Loudness Unit Full Scale) is a way that shows real loudness according to the maximal level (0). This resembles the digital scale.
Clipping can take many forms and mainly results in a distorted sound. In certain genres, this sound of distortion or “over-drive” (or analog clipping) is preferred. An important note to make here is that these forms of preferred clipping are used on the individual tracks or instruments in the production process. The problematic clipping happens when the master track or signal reaches levels above 0 dB. This is what mastering engineers try to prevent.
On the right is an extreme example. This song clips so much the music is very distorted.
Lower your speakers before listening!
