Mastering engineer Bob Katz has an interesting rant about unlistenably loud CDs. He asserts that contemporary CDs are ten decibels louder than those made 15 years ago.

Remember that decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale. A ten-decibel increase means that contemporary CDs are nearly four times as loud as older discs. (See this handy article on ProRec.com to learn more about why you’re going deaf). But the volume comes at a cost — There are a limited number of bits in each sample. Once all those zeros are flipped to ones, there’s nowhere else to put the data, and things start sounding bad. Really bad.

The war for loudness has only casualties and losers. Some CDs made in the year 2001 are 10 dB hotter than those made in 1990! But the system can’t take it…this is only obtained with horrendous amounts of compression and limiting. Can you take one of these CDs for more than 5 minutes? They sound fatiguing, overmodulated…..

Fact: Your CDs are hotter than anything made in 1990. They have reached the maximum level that they can and still maintain the sound quality. CDs cannot escalate because there is a limit. The waveforms of the top of the charts “hits” are shaped like 2 x 4s, sound fatiguing and unrelenting and have no relationship with the sound of a good album. No one is happy—-not the artists, not the producers… And on the radio? Still sound like crap, only worse.

Read the full post at DigitalDomain.

I may do a little post about binary mathematics and explain why it sounds like ass when CDs clip. I’ve become obsessed with this recently because I’ve been ripping a lot of my old vinyl LPs onto my computer. I watch the wave forms as they scroll by on the computer, and marvel at all the musical detail we’ve lost.