The Loudness War, Redux
My buddy Keller Glass recently posted an amusing reaction on his blog to a December NPR piece on the Loudness War. In his post, Keller offered a succinct differentiation of dynamic-range compression and digital compression—two often-confused audio concepts. (The part where he compares encoding MP3s to excoriating flesh is especially nice.)
I’d actually heard the NPR essay and had planned on writing something in response. What follows, then, might be considered a companion piece to Keller’s writing, and perhaps the beginning of a friendly dialog between blogs on this and other subjects.
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There is a penchant in popular discourse for using language of conflict to characterize our reaction to any pervasive cultural affliction. It’s a tendency shared by politicians, pundits, and common individuals. We’ve embarked famously on a “war on drugs,” a “war on poverty,” a “war on terror,” and now (with appropriate anticlimax) a war on…“loudness”?
Such phrases are supposed to be inspiring, as they tacitly cast us in a heroic struggle against an insidious—if frustratingly abstract—foe. The problem with such rhetoric, however rousing, is that it isn’t particularly useful: How exactly do you wage a war on poverty—or loudness for that matter—anyway?