It's One Louder

Rolling Stone have an article that's at once intriguing and obvious. It's called "The Death of High Fidelity - In the age of MP3s, sound quality is worse than ever" and it's about how music is being manipulated to sound good on a iPod (or whatever) at the expense of just about everything else:

Over the past decade and a half, a revolution in recording technology has changed the way albums are produced, mixed and mastered — almost always for the worse. "They make it loud to get [listeners'] attention," Bendeth says. Engineers do that by applying dynamic range compression, which reduces the difference between the loudest and softest sounds in a song. Like many of his peers, Bendeth believes that relying too much on this effect can obscure sonic detail, rob music of its emotional power and leave listeners with what engineers call ear fatigue. "I think most everything is mastered a little too loud," Bendeth says. "The industry decided that it's a volume contest."

(Via Robot Wisdom)