Do you still enjoy listening to CD's ?
After having listened for years to your home sound system you bought yourself a really good system: separate components, decent cables, real monitors which play music and not just produce sound... So you start listening to your CD's again. Disappointment: They don't sound that good at all! You can hear cracking noise during the loudest parts of the CD, you hear that the soundlevel isn't stable, ... What's going on? Does your system have a problem? No! Most pop CD's sound really bad these days. Here are two reasons for this: They're mastered too loud and/or they're recorded digitally on computerbased digital multitrack recorders by people who don't have enough experience (and apparently no good ears).
What's wrong?
The last 5 years the average sound level of CD's has increased. Where 10 years ago the average level of a pop CD was about -18 dB it's now almost -8 dB! If you have equipment like a DAT or CD recorder, you'll have noticed this before. The theoretical part: the louder a sound is digitally recorded,
the less distorted it is and the better it sounds (especially on cheap systems). But when the 0dB level is passed the distortion increases drastically. The result of this is that the sound signal is clipped: you can hear cracking noise during the loudest parts of a song. Sound technicians tried to hide this: they use very cleaver sound limitors and compressors so the
cracking disappears. But with this increase of compression sound quality decreases... the music sounds flat, there's no depth in it, there's almost no volume difference between the loudest and the most quiet parts...
Some examples (level displays, cd's to listen to, ...)
The solution:
The average sound level must decrease again: no more extremely loud mastering resulting in optimal CD sound on optimal systems. Here's where the name of the organisation originates from: We want to get the average sound level down by 6 dB.
Some propositions to sound technicians
Some feedback from people who visited this site and other food for thought
If you are also horrified by this situation, want to add some records to the list or have any other comment: please mail me.
If you agree with me: please put a link and icon on your site, sign the guestbook/petition
If we can show record companies that a lot of people want better sounding CD's, we can get some results!