Today, Friday March 16, is Dynamic Range Day. You may not have known that. Not very many people do.
Dynamic Range Day isn't a "Day" in the sense of President's Day or Labor Day. It isn't a national holiday. No feckless legislator wasted buckets of taxpayer money by shepherding yards of meaningless legislation through miles of worthless committees. Dynamic Range Day is one of those movements that's proclaimed in stentorian tones by its partisans but passes unnoticed by 99.99999% of the general population.
That's a pity because Dynamic Range Day is a worthwhile cause. The point is to draw attention to the plight of those cringing audiophiles who must endure the horror of dynamically compressed pop recordings. I'll grant that in the great scheme of things dynamic compression is somewhat less troubling than global starvation or slave trafficking or political suppression. But there it is.
In case you're not familiar with the term dynamic compression: in making a recording, it's possible to juice up the volume on softer passages so as to bring them closer to the loudest passages on the recording. Thus the whole shebang remains at a fairly constant volume throughout—i.e., pegged right at the maximum volume possible. It's sort of like listening to nonstop shouting. That's useful if the purpose of your recording is to keep the monkeys in the zoo entertained, so as to prevent them from becoming restless and throwing their doo-doo at the visitors. That dweeb on the 24 Divisadero, earbuds blasting out an endlessly hypnotic pshee-pt-pta pshee-pt-pta pshee-pt-pta, is being sufficiently entertained, a.k.a. subdued, so none of us are wiping doo-doo spatters off our faces and muttering Oh my god how gross oh yecch. This is a good thing.
I refuse to consider that monkeys might constitute the entire audience for pop music. It's possible that other listeners just might have other ideas. They just might prefer for a recording to bear some fleeting resemblance to natural music—i.e., that it might display a range of volume from soft to loud, that it might have moments of restraint or even tenderness, that it might (God forbid) offer some variety and contrast. Even if most pop music is appalling drivel, at least let it be properly reproduced appalling drivel.
Now, I can't say I'm all that hot and bothered about Dynamic Range Day. I'm a member of that obscure tribe for whom dynamic compression is an affliction that befalls others, not me. I'm a classical music guy. We classical music folk don't take kindly to such manipulative shenanigans, nor do the engineers treat us as mindless chattering marmosets. Then again, the engineers don't actually treat us at all—classical's heyday as the governing force of the recording industry is long past. We classical folk have become a minuscule constituency with only featherweight financial clout. The big-world recording labels mostly shun us, so we have retreated to our own boutique but plucky labels. That's a crying shame. The big-world recording labels are rapidly losing contact with the world outside the monkey house. Without the challenges of capturing the dynamic and frequency ranges of a full symphony orchestra or piano or chamber group, big-world recording engineers are turning into hearing-impaired zombies, basing their judgments solely on the way a waveform looks in the ProTools window. 130 years of evolutionary audio progress is circling the drain, flushed away by a callow generation of tone-deaf techies.
That isn't to say that dynamic compression has never been applied to classical music. From 1941 through 1948 the San Francisco Symphony was recorded via a telephone-line linkup between the War Memorial Opera House and RCA's studios in Los Angeles. To avoid over-saturating the available bandwidth, the engineers imposed a volume limiter similar to those used on radio broadcasts. Combine that with the need to keep quieter passages from disappearing into the background surface noise endemic to the shellac discs of the day, and you have an open-and-shut case of dynamic compression.
Radio broadcasts have typically been subject to such compression. I spent many hours this past year making digital transcriptions of tapes made from 1960s FM radio broadcasts. The displayed waveforms from those broadcasts told the story in unmistakable terms: not only did the upper end of the frequency scale top off abruptly, almost looking as though a hedge trimmer had been taken to the frequencies above about 9000 Hz, but the amplitude range was also suspiciously shallow. Clearly the sound was being massaged and manipulated in order to survive the sonic depredations of FM radio.
Modern digital recording makes an unprecedented dynamic range available. There's really no purpose to applying dynamic compression to anything. Except if the purpose is to keep the chimps sedated, which is, unfortunately, all too often the case. So speak up for Dynamic Range Day, and speak up for humanity itself. Don't let those engineers at Universal Music make a monkey out of you: compel them to treat you as Homo sapiens, and encourage them leave Pan troglodytes to its own business, doo-doo or no doo-doo.