The Loudness War on HackerTube: recommended by 3 Hacker News commenters across 3 separate months, 2009–2025.
explainer · evergreen
A two-minute demonstration of the loudness war, showing how heavy dynamic range compression in CD mastering makes music louder while degrading sound quality. It uses audio examples so you can hear the distortion.
HN keeps linking it as the shortest clear explanation of over-compression and brickwalled mastering.
“this video which gave a very succinct answer to my question”
8 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
Your post led me down the rabbit hole of over-compression, not for the first time, and I ended up at this video which gave a very succinct answer to my question of: "Okay, I realize that music is getting compressed, but what are we losing?" ▶ this video Via a nice article with analysis: [link]
in “The Dark Art of Mastering Music” · View on HN
The same reason why music on the radio is so dang loud– excessive compression. See: The Loudness War (just 1:54 mins long): ▶ this video
in “Why Are TV Ads So Danged Loud?” · View on HN
I think one of the reasons that those people who prefer vinyl over digital do so, is that the recordings on vinyl are mastered with different qualities in mind than their digital counterparts. There's a YouTube video floating around called The Loudness War ( ▶ this video ) that describes what I'm talking about. I distinctly remember albums on audio CDs sounding better to me (great clarity, vibrancy, etc.) back in the early 1990s. Then, somewhere toward the end of the 1990s, CDs just started to sound worse. I blame the trend described in that video. I suspect that vinyl recordings do not suffer from this same tendency toward loudness in the audio mastering process, and that is why you have audiophiles insisting that vinyl sounds better than digital.
in “In a digital age, vinyl albums are making a comeback” · View on HN
And now we have the Loudness War where the songs are so highly compressed that there is no dynamic range. Because of this, I have to reduce the volume so it isn't painful to listen to. And this makes what should have been a live recording with interesting sound into background noise. Example: ▶ this video If you want a recent-ish album to listen to that has good sound, try Daft Punk's Random Access Memories (which won the Best Engineered Album Grammy award in 2014). Or anything engineered by Alan Parsons (he's in this list many times) [link]
in “The 'Toy Story' You Remember” · View on HN
”The same thoughtless disregard for basic music fundamentals that plagued the preliminary edits ended up on the final OST.” As a musician and music-lover, seeing how they brickwalled [1][2] Mick’s tracks in the screenshots only serves to add to the heartbreak of his entire saga. [1] Loudness War [link] [2] The Loudness War ▶ this video
in “My full statement regarding DOOM Eternal” · View on HN
I will still occasionally buy CDs (I bought my first player in 1984 - the Sony CDP-101), but I'm a lot more critical about what I buy now. For the past 10-ish years, the studios have been eliminating dynamic range and cranking the knob on their compression software to "11". As a result, music has become painful to listen to. The name for this is the Loudness War, and with the exception of titles like Daft Punk's Random Access Memories , we are losing. [link] And here's an audio sample demonstrating what it sounds like: ▶ this video
in “The CD’s Rise in the Music Business: An Oral History” · View on HN
>In recent decades, mastering engineers have been tasked with making studio albums louder via the application of something called dynamic range compression; essentially, the volume gets turned up on the quiet bits, and turned down on the loud bits. The cumulative effect is a song that sounds bigger and punchier The writer doesn't seem to understand loudness here. This is exactly the opposite effect of DRC (dynamic range compression). Music gets less punchier and sounds smaller, as transients are pushed down in the mix. Listening to music with less DRC is more damaging to your ears (although it sounds better), if you are comparing two tracks with equal loudness. Keeping loudness constant in this comparison is valid because we will adjust the volume knob based on the track's psychoacoustic loudness. Example: ▶ this video and ▶ this video have roughly the same loudness. The first has less DRC and is more damaging to your hearing. This misunderstanding breaks down half of the article's argument. The other half---that loud music is cooler than it was decades ago---is probably valid I guess.
in “I Am Worried About My Ears” · View on HN
I'm a bit of an audio geek. What sets me off though is not digital compression (although I'm sure you lose some fidelity, I rarely/never notice any loss with 256kbps mp4s). What is really awful is excessive dynamic compression in modern CDs themselves - and it's far worse than digital compression. Music simply loses its punch. It can be hard to do an apples to apples comparison here, but if you compare an older album (Beatles albums come to mind) and a "remastered" version, one of the differences will typically be greater dynamic compression in the remaster. Some resources on the topic: [link] Some examples: ▶ this video [link]
in “The Leave” · View on HN