Tuesday, July 17, 2012

The August, 2012 Electronic Musician magazine has an article on Jack White: 

"One stipulation White had for mastering engineer Bob Ludwig was that he wouldn't use any dynamics processing in the mastering process. 'There was a study from Earl Vickers [sfxmachine.com/docs/loudnesswar] about the loudness wars,' [Vance] Powell says. 'As the loudness war escalated, record sales went down. I'm not saying we're killing the loudness war. But I think it's a very bold move for Jack to say, 'I realize there are records out there that are going to be louder, but I don't care....'"

He asked Bob if there was a way to make it louder without changing the dynamics of the song, and Bob said yes. 'So the master came back, and it sounded great. There's nothing squashed or lost in the dynamics, and it still sounded really loud.'"


To me, the music has a more open quality than many recent CDs - it breathes and feels less fatiguing. At any rate, this seems to be an existence proof that it's possible for artists to hit #1 on the Billboard charts without hypercompression.