Looking at the period between the turn-of-the-century format feud and the arrival of electrical amplification in the 1920s, I situate the loudness war within a longer historical trajectory, and demonstrate a variety of ways in which loudness and volume have been controversial issues in – and constitutive elements of – the history of sound reproduction. In fact, loudness has been a source of pleasure, a target of criticism, and an engine of technological change since the very earliest days of commercial sound reproduction. My point is not to weigh in on this debate, but to suggest that the issue of loudness in sound recording and playback can be traced back much earlier than the 1980s. Critics of the loudness war maintain that the average volume level of popular music recordings has increased dramatically since the proliferation of digital technology in the 1980s, and that this increase has had detrimental effects on sound quality and the listening experience. The purpose of this paper is to provide some historical perspective on the so-called loudness war.
In addition, it was found that subject factors such as age group, and speculatively the amount of exposure to different genres, were of considerable influence on listener preferences. The presented seven versions of each musical program were carefully matched in loudness as the versions were varied in compression level, and so differences in loudness per se cannot account for the differences in preferences choices observed between musical programs. The experimental approach taken in this study was to conduct a subjective preference test requiring listeners to make a forced choice between seven levels of compression for each of five musical programs that differed in musical genre.
The study reported here investigated whether the amounts of hyper-compression typical of current audio practice produce results that listeners prefer.
Achieving 'loud' recordings as a result of hyper-compression is a prevailing expectation within the creative system of music production, sustaining a myth that has been developing since the mid-twentieth century as a consequence of the 'louder is better' paradigm.
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