The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Belatedly Found Explanation for a Puzzling Problem (2026-03-30)

A teaser image quote from A.J. Wykes excellent article on the 'loudness war' that blighted so much music through the late 1990s and up to the 2010s. Do check out the original article on the Sound Guys blog, which includes sound samples.

There are many reasons I gave up listening to over-the-air radio, not least the way any and all stations are now like cable television: constant talk and most time taken up with repetitive and generally useless advertising. (No doubt there are sociologists or anthropologists out there who could complete impressive studies of what the advertisements suggest about the presumed listeners.) I had noticed what little pop music there was seemed to be really, not so much loud, though it was that too, as noisy. This was the mid to late 1990s as grunge took off in popularity, and now I suppose some of this came of attempts to maintain the sound ambiance of live performances in less than adequate music performance spaces. Despite this, there were still some bands from this time I quite enjoyed, such as garbage and oasis, even though the latter seemed to despise their fans almost as much as metallica does theirs. On their breakout album, "(What's the Story) Morning Glory?" the actual title track is basically a tremendous wall of noise, the sort of thing it can be fun to play while getting started on a messy job like washing a car or something. It always struck me as somewhat odd, considering the other tracks were recorded and mixed in the standard way we have gotten used to through the twentieth century: minimize noise, clear vocal and instrument tracks. There is nothing to suggest this specific track was recorded live in performance or similar. Still, as we know, musicians and artists in general opt to do peculiar things from time to time. Some experiments land, others don't. This one was okay.

Years later, on a foray to replace broken headphones, I made my reluctant way out to a newish big box electronics store, very much out of my way. But, the store was among those that would honour the headphone warranty, so it was worth a shot and a nice day besides. Once done with the headphone issue it would be possible to enjoy a fun walk exploring a less familiar neighbourhood on the way home. This was my plan, and like most such plans, it did not go quite as intended. While I did manage to successfully navigate the warranty redemption process and acquire working headphones, it was no easy feat, and not due to the sales clerk. Being a big box store, it was and probably still is, basically a warehouse, with the attendant high ceilings and not great speakers for its sound system. There was music playing, but the overall effect was so cacophonous that never had I been so desperate to get out of a store again, and been so relieved on getting out the door. I can see this being a technique applied in certain cases like dubious fast food restaurants, but it seemed completely counterproductive for a store selling gadgets and accessories to the gadgets. I could not understand originally how the clerk could stand the racket. They didn't appear to have ear plugs on, and the music, such as it was, wasn't so loud we couldn't speak to each other at normal vocal volume. It was all very odd. A number of my friends commented they had had similar experiences in this warehouse-type of store, and we all agreed it was odd. Odd, but not the sort of odd that demands investigation.

So it was with a combination of surprise and yes delight I happened on an article helping to explain both those oddly noisy music tracks and the subsequent unfortunate noise experience at the big box store. A.J. Wykes wrote a longform article back in the summer of 2021 on the Sound Guys blog, What's the loudness war? How has it affected music? Who are the winners and losers? Wykes explains how music in the fifteen years or so starting from around 1995 indeed became both louder and in effect noisier. Go figure, in discussing the digital tools sound engineers could use to make music tracks louder, Wykes says, "These tools meant that, starting in the mid-'90s, engineers could make their tracks significantly louder than before. As those brickwall limiters were pushed harder, the sound became increasingly harsh. (What's The Story) Morning Glory by Oasis is considered a landmark example of detrimental amounts of compression, combined with extreme limiting, to create something absurdly loud." Well, how about that. The noise comes of the compression and clipping effects, the audio equivalent of the nasty looking artefacts on an over-compressed jpeg. Combine the harsh effect with bouncing and echoing around a warehouse outfitted as a big box store, and the result is bound to be less than pretty. But it is also something a person could get used to if they followed music steadily through those fifteen years and didn't generally find it unpleasant. By accident, I hadn't done this, so part of my response at the big box store was about genuine shock at how awful the noise was.

How oddly appropriate the breaking point for this loudness, clipping, and distortion was achieved by metallica, who made such a hash of the sound quality on the original release of their death magnetic album their fans wound up reconstructing it using the video game guitar hero iii. I am by no means a heavy metal connoisseur, while appreciating how the serious bands are amazing at finding ways to be yes loud and still allowing their instruments and vocals to stand out. It is something of a high wire act though, and it was most likely going to be one of them who'd fall and be popular enough for the fall to have some serious impact. (No pun intended.)

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