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At first there was pop music in the sixties and the development of "normalizing", where the mastering engineers manipulated the levels literally in a compression method that located the loudest peaks in the music - typically for pop songs - and then raised everything else up as far as possible to make the entire song play at hot levels. Radio station DJ's loved it. It is still in use today, only now it has literally become a "war zone", and is actually referred to in engineering circles as the "loudness wars", where artists are determined to have their songs mastered at the hottest possible levels over other artist's recordings and so forth.
The method has several different names: normalizing, compressing, dynamic compressing. Some listeners now have coined the term brick-walling. The process literally compresses the dynamic range of the music, losing all of the clarity and nuance in favor of just being loud. In pop music it is neither a wrong thing or a right thing, it is just a thing. BUT... in orchestral music, it sure seems like a wrong thing. And it is a sound I personally just can not stand.
Sadly, somewhere along the way a handful of film composers adopted the method, and certain labels have embraced it as well. For me it has ushered in a generation of dreadful sounding soundtracks where the orchestra no longer sounds like an orchestra but instead like some sort of mechanical mass of distorted noise with virtually no clear orchestral timbres.
It is hard to mention the technique without at least naming a few names. With all due respect to the respective parties, it is a sound that Brian Tyler utilizes and I find it a challenge to enjoy. The two Expendables albums are impossibly frustrating for me, especially since the scores are great and sound great in their respective films. I want to enjoy the otherwise spectacular Quo Vadis re-recording made by Tadlow but the mastering is so heavily normalized that virtually everything plays too loud. The climaxes of the marches are actually distorted to a point where the trumpets and horns are indistinguishable from the loud noise. Add an overdose of low end and reverb and the results don't appeal to me. In a new digital-age recording of a large orchestra and all of the colors it produces, this is not the sound I think we should be getting. I appreciate it has become a matter of taste but it just is not my taste.
I am happy to see Varese Sarabande bringing back a lot of great albums from their past catalog, but I am equally saddened that so many of them now sound worse in my opinion than did the original releases. Somehow, even the electronics of Runaway lost something when all of the wide dynamic range Goldsmith originally achieved was later squeezed into a narrow range just to make the album play louder. This also frustrated me with the later incarnations of The Fury, where only the original Arista album (and the first CD releases of it) retained what I felt was the sound Williams and company originally captured at the time. There are many others. Sometimes it is done because the hiss has been squeezed out of the recording, then a heavy dose of reverb and/or EQ gets applied to help make up for the limited sonics after artificial noise reduction has been utilized, and so forth. By the time the album gets to my ears, the music is as artificial as the techniques applied to re-create it. I personally will always prefer natural and realistic sound, hiss and all, over the unnatural processed, compressed... well, you get the idea.
The sound after normalizing actually changes the dynamics of the instruments in relationship to each other because it is a process that compresses the entire audio, in effect turning that incredible sound of an orchestra with all of the amazing colors and nuances and varied dynamics into a headache-inducing loud mechanical beast. Literally a wall of sound where even quiet parts are louder than they should be. It even affects our Once Upon A Time albums. I appreciate it is an artist thing... it just isn't my thing.
Joe Tarantino, our engineer for the last 25 years, says to imagine it visually by thinking of Bart Simpson's head with all of those squares, and then realize that normalizing literally does that to the wave forms: it cuts everything off at both ends and turns the audio into the equivalent of Bart's head. It may not matter that much in the contemporary music scene, but it sure has a negative effect on the orchestral scene. And it just isn't necessary. Maybe on the techno-driven film scores, but on purely orchestral ones, especially classics from the past, it just makes no sense.
It is something I have never encountered in classical recordings. I hope I never do. But sadly, the pop industry's "loudness wars" have invaded the soundtrack scene. I, for one, am not thrilled about it.
--Doug
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