Ever notice how loud and tiring music has become?

I read this really interesting article recently about the state of music; in particular, it was about the "Loudness War". Basically, the article said that the various music organizations have been competing to see who can make the loudest album, which, they think, will gather the most attention and therefore sell the most copies. The problem, and there definitely is one, is that they make albums louder by a method called Dynamic Range Compression. What DRC does is to take a song's waveform and stretches basically pulls all the lower parts up to be nearer the higher parts, meaning the entire song sounds louder, and you hear everything at about the same level. It certain situations this can be helpful, such as with a car radio. If you've ever listened to classical music while driving, you'll notice you have to play with the volume a lot. However, when all of a song is more or less at the same level, the impact of a song's differences fall away and the song loses its oomph, as it were. The article (right here) gives the analogy of the human voice. When we speak, the volume and range is very dynamic, shifting up and down constantly. When we yell, it makes an impact on those around us, but if we do nothing but yell, not only does it lose its effect, but we the listener become highly fatigued.

It is the same with music. I had actually been noticing in the last few months that I quickly grow tired of several of my favorite cds, no matter how much I love the music. I didn't know why, but it was, at the very least, a bit annoying. Having read about the current state of things in the music biz, I now understand why, although now I find I notice it constantly whenever I listen to recent music. I've actually started listening to a lot more classical music since I discovered this, and find I am really enjoying having music with soft parts and loud parts and all that good stuff.