If It’s Too Loud, You May Not Be Too Old

Austin American-Statesman pop critic Joe Gross gives a thorough, fascinating overview of what’s happened to the mastering process of records in the last 20 years–or why your older CDs sound so quiet and textured when they’re mixed up in the changer with albums you bought last week. The answer lies in the compression of albums, and overdoing it–which is something that artists from Mastodon to Christina Aguilera are guilty of–may actually result in shorter attention spans on the part of listeners:

Here’s the punch line: The brain can’t process sounds that lack a dynamic range for very long. It’s an almost subconscious response. […]

“It’s ear fatigue,” [engineer Jerry] Tubbs says, “After three songs you take it off. There’s no play to give your ears even a few milliseconds of depth and rest.”

Alan Bean is a recording/mastering engineer in Harrison, Maine. He’s a former professional musician and a doctor of occupational medicine.

“It stinks that this has happened,” he says. “Our brains just can’t handle hearing high average levels of anything very long, whereas we can stand very loud passages, as long as it is not constant. It’s the lack of soft that fatigues the human ear.”

Everything Louder Than Everything Else [austin360.com]