New documentary uncovers the truth behind the loudness wars

Waves Audio has released its original short documentary, How Music Got Loud.

“I was accused—you ruined music!” This striking remark was said to an engineer who helped shape how recordings were made over the last 30 years.

How Music Got Loud: The Untold Story of the Loudness Wars is a new documentary uncovering the controversial battle that transformed modern music: the race to make every track louder than the last.

For three decades, the pursuit of loudness has redefined audience expectations. This short film exposes why Led Zeppelin now sounds relatively quiet compared to today’s chart-toppers like Sabrina Carpenter. It reveals how, starting in the early 1990s, digital tools gave producers unprecedented power and temptation to push volume to its limits. What began as innovation soon became an obsession, transforming the way records sound and how we listen.

But the story didn’t end there. Over time, the pendulum swung back, and the pursuit of musicality returned to the fore. The film examines the industry’s attempts at balancing its obsession with loudness while encouraging dynamic range; the ultimate goal of creating records that audiences can connect with.

Produced by Waves Audio, whose pioneering plugins helped define digital mastering, this film tells the story through the voices of those who were there – the engineers behind some of the most influential records ever made.

• Howie Weinberg – The man behind the mastering of legendary albums Nevermind and Blood Sugar Sex Magik. If you’ve ever blasted The Killers, Pearl Jam or Muse, you’ve felt Howie’s work.
• Dale Becker – The mastering engineer trusted by Billie Eilish and SZA to finalize their most recent releases, Hit Me Hard and Soft, and SOS, respectively.
• Gavin Lurssen & Reuben Cohen – The figures of the mastering house responsible for releases by Metallica, Queens of the Stone Age, Foo Fighters and Robert Plant, to name a few.
• Jesse Ray Ernster – The acclaimed mixer for Doja Cat, Burna Boy and a slew of others.

Also featured: mastering legend Bob Katz, author of what is considered the definitive work on the subject, Mastering Audio: The Art and the Science, and Meir Shashoua, Co-founder and CTO of Waves, the innovator whose tools have transformed the way music is produced and experienced.

How Music Got Loud offers a rare, inside look at how artistry, technology and competition collided to create the defining sound of the last thirty years, and what that means for the future of music.

Are the Loudness Wars Over?! Mastering Legends Weigh In

More information: Waves

Source: https://rekkerd.org/new-documentary-uncovers-the-truth-behind-the-loudness-wars/

 

Is that all?
I mean, it seems a trailer, doesn't it?
I read Bob Katz, and other things about audio, it's a huge matter.

 

It's basically just an ad for Waves.
Therefore, here are a few original ones with Bob Katz:

Bob Katz about the "loudness war" part 1

Bob Katz about the "loudness war" part 2

Bob Katz about the "loudness war" part 3

The End Of The Loudness War?
www.soundonsound.com/techniques/end-loudness-war

 

secret forbidden youtube video about the loudness war conspiration nobody ever knew of goes viral! click now to fill my bank account!

gehen sie weiter, hier gibt es nichts zu sehen.

 

Bullsh1t. There is no secret. Everybody wanted/wants to be the loudest. Simple. It's the fault of the idiot who move the sliders. Or the geniuses who move the sliders. Depends on what you like. The solution is loudness/RMS normalizing. So everyone can have what he/she/it wants.

Simple.

 

There is no loudness war. It is a misinterpretation and Katz's statement in the first minute of the "Bob Katz about the "loudness war" part 1" video is everything someone has to know to understand this.

Music that is produced extremely dense is annoying at best because it is "hammering" into your ears all the time even at lower levels.

 

Different releases of ABBA's 1980 song "Super Trouper" show different levels of loudness compared to the original 1980 release. This is displayed in Audacity, a basic DAW.

 

Those Audacity waveforms are a shite way to judge any of this. Peaks for the sake of peaks just make modern speaker systems inefficient, especially active ones. Hardly anyone’s listening on gear that can actually resolve micro-transients or big crest-factor swings anymore, and most amps and active speakers now are way more RMS leaning than peak leaning.


Because of that, the 1980 master probably isn’t going to sound that great on most modern setups. The later versions with a lower crest factor will translate better in the real world whether people like it or not. Most modern active speakers are terrible at doing dynamics properly. Push them to where the track gets interesting and they either start distorting, throw up IMD, or the protection kicks in and flattens everything anyway. At that point you’re not really “missing” much by not having massive peaks in the first place.


If you actually want to hear why the 80s mixes made sense, you need an 80s-style system or something close to it. Big passive speakers that can shift air, driven by a proper Class AB amp doing 250–300 watts peak, with very little DSP babysitting. Lower mid-tier Class D and most modern active speakers just can’t do that. On a system like that, Thriller genuinely moves air. On a Bluetooth speaker it just sounds thin and a bit shit no matter how loud you turn it up. Unless you are really into Michael Jackson or something, anybody could admit this


People also forget that crest factors are lower now before mastering even starts. Modern arrangements are full of low end right down into 20–30 Hz, and low frequencies ramp up RMS over time . Once that hits a limiter, the waveform’s obviously going to get denser, sausage-ier. And despite what people think, most modern limiters aren’t just shaving peaks, they’re managing averages mostly. Limiters have not been straight forward peak limiters for over 20 years now.


The loudness war isn’t really a thing anymore. Dynamics for the sake of dynamics is just inefficient on modern systems. If you want something to feel dynamic now, focus on contrasts and where the energy in different sounds sits, not how tall the spikes look in Audacity.

 

The original release of Supertrooper is a vinyl release and can't be compared to later releases mastered for CD because vinyl as a medium is constrained by different physical limits on dynamics/frequency response than CD. I'm fairly certain I've covered this area in depth on here previously so I'll not repeat myself.

What is often overlooked in these endless discussions on the loudness war is that it has been going on a lot longer than since the advent of CD; Chasing loudness actually started with Edison cylinders and became common practice with vinyl mastering. It was always the aim of every publisher to have louder releases than the "competitors".

A case in point is how the publisher drives this nonsense, not necessarily the engineer or artist (though they can also be guilty). A number of years ago I was doing mastering for a library music artist who was particularly sensitive to compression. We reached a compromise where I felt it was loud enough for publishing and where the artist couldn't detect any adverse consequences. The library company spat it all back at them, saying it had to be LOUDER, so I had to print new masters, some of which were definitely damaged by distortion, which they then accepted. All the work following that, I delivered two versions to them; the good one and the LOUD one.

 

I complained about the loudness 'war' years ago to a 'certain mastering engineer' (...)

I had been offered a Giorgia (Giorgia Todrani) album and placed it in the player: ... Nice, nice! but, here and there (very) tiny crackles. Ahh***!

I look at the CD surface: nothing, as shiny as clean mirror.
OK, I buy another one...
Same.

So, I extracted it into Samplitude. Zoomed the wave file. Is was on screen, obvious: the wave's max seemed to have been shaved as if by a carpenter's plane (3, 4, 5 spikes in a row where agreed by some record companies, but here is was way more, and really audible).

Sad. I like that lady. If my memory's good, it was recorded at Sunset Sound, BIG overall sound. And then mastered in italy.

OK, I take some courage and write to that mastering engineer I adore (who doesn't?), joining examples I extracted from the CD.

Surprise for me, he answers me very fast and VERY kindly and we start to exchange mails and mails on that loudness war (despite his intense schedule).

As particular example, he send me a screen cap of an album he had to master at this moment. It's a catastrophe! In no so tiny portions, here and there, the wave looks like a piece of paper squashed in your hands and thrown in the trash bin. And certainly impossible to master as is.

Not a little band. A huge band. Money. Much. Wanted to sound big on radio. Bigger than others. More loud. Goes with their genre, metal (met them on their 1988 tour in France, Zenith de Paris, promoting their new album with their new bassist - so you know who -). It's difficult to have them admit to have the mix redone and to understand there is no need to destroy the sound pushing the level to extremes.

When we met at the A.E.S. convention, it was the center of topics - with, always, B.L.'s funny, entertaining, enlightening anecdotes -.

Bob Ludwig at AES, talking about the "Loudness war" :

 

Last edited: Jan 4, 2026 at 1:14 AM

It would be nice to listen a comparison of snippets.

 

Honestly, the “loudness war” ended decades ago. What we have today is mostly people still fighting a war that no longer exists — and often losing because they haven’t noticed the battlefield changed.

Why whould you want your track to be louder ?

Louder than what, exactly? In the age of LUFS normalization, near-perfect digital audio delivery, vastly improved monitoring, and better acoustics than ever? Streaming platforms normalize playback anyway. Chasing RMS or LUFS targets as a goal in itself feels a bit like a “mine is bigger” contest when everyone’s already using the same measuring tape.

Many of the most acclaimed records in history — The Dark Side of the Moon, engineered by Alan Parsons, or modern film scores mixed by Alan Meyerson for Hans Zimmer — absolutely use compression. But they use it willingly, sparingly, and musically, not as a blunt weapon to win a numbers game.

Compression and limiting are tools, not ideologies. Dense music can sound amazing; it can also be fatiguing. Wide-dynamic music can be breathtaking; it can also fall flat. The difference is intent, not meter readings.

Personally, I love an L4-style loud mix and enjoy aggressive masters — but that’s a creative choice, not an attempt to “win” anything. I’m not trying to hit a certain RMS or LUFS; I’m trying to make the record feel right.

 

Have anybody noticed an interesting thing on Youtube when audio gets lower in volume... and then you click right mouse button on the video "stats for nerds" and see that the audio was lowered by say 8dB or so. It's the loudness penalty. I sometimes tell these people they shouldn't post such loud videos because they are more quiet and you have to turn the volume up. My rule for Youtube is never go higher than -10dB RMS so it always ends up nicely loud, just like everybody else who pays attention to this.

 

Calling it a "war" per se is probably in reality a misnomer, but this incessant destruction of any sort of dynamic range in audio production has been a definite problem for the last couple of decades. The "whoever is responsible" is most likely a white elephant since the entire audio industry is basically to blame. There are still engineers (myself included) out there who have never subscribed to this bullshit concept of "if everyone else does it then must be right". It's very similar to the human monkey "herd" mentality that is the driving force behind the overuse of the word "literally" in every sentence, "pokemon", and the clinically viral, massive worldwide preoccupation with the cell phone.

 

Last edited: Jan 3, 2026 at 9:13 PM

Downwards compression doesn't have anything to do with loudness. you wanna talk about myths? of all the myths of the "loudness wars" nonsense, this is probably the biggest one. compression will actually rob you of loudness not gain it because it heavily biases towards acting upon and tracking low end. you can use an EQ in the sidechain to remove it from the detection, but then you aren't really controlling the peaks of the low end that eat up tonnes of perceived loudness. driving limiters and clippers etc with averaged low end e.g sustained sub is what makes them act louder. extremely loud modern mixdowns are built around this premise of getting the balance right between the sub and tops so what the limiter thinks it is seeing is something closer to pink or white noise. compression can increase crest factor without actually increasing dynamics. this is what "overcompression"is especially with plugins that can't actually follow the audio input as it exists(most of them). nobody attaining -3 or 4 RMS mixdowns in a 1-3 second windowing is doing so through compression. equal distribution of energy is what creates loudness. compression without equal distribution just creates a smaller more pushed back sound. you stick that through a limiter or clipper, and you have an edgy sounding finished result that wont have any perceived loudness to it whatsoever.

I'll say it again for the people in the back of the room. compression has NOTHING to do with loudness at all. limiters are not compressors. if you think all there is to loudness is squashing peaks then you are a bit behind in the learning curve

 

You’re bang on on mechanics — spectral balance, low-end management, crest factor and density are what drive perceived loudness, not “slamming a compressor and calling it a day”. We agree there.

Where I think we’re talking past each other is that my point wasn’t how loudness is technically achieved, but why it stopped being an arms race in the first place.

In a LUFS-normalized ecosystem, loudness is no longer a competitive metric — it’s an aesthetic decision. You can make something dense, bright and aggressive, or wide and dynamic, and playback systems will level them anyway. That’s fundamentally different from the CD-era “push it or lose” mindset.

And yes — compression alone doesn’t magically make things louder. But it’s still part of the intentional envelope shaping used on countless respected records like "The Dark Side of the Moon" — not to win loudness, but to shape feel.

So I don’t think anyone here is saying “just squash peaks = loud”. That myth died a long time ago. What also died is the idea that louder-on-the-meter means better-in-the-world.

At this point, chasing loudness for its own sake feels less like engineering and more like a “mine is bigger” contest after normalization already leveled the field.

 

I can agree that the "war" is basically over. However the resultant sound quality achieved by releasing a track with a waveform that looks like a cardboard box is still shite when listened to on any playback setup. You basically only hear whatever had the most volume in the mix at the studio before it hit the so-called "mastering" stage. Everything else is sucked down the toilet underneath the rest of it to what amounts to an unintelligible noise floor. The days of a transparent mix where everything is able to be heard (depending on the quality of your playback setup) is gone. The so called modern mastering "techniques" make it sound like shite no matter what you play it back on.

Back in the day the nature of the content and the distribution medium dictated (sort of) the amount of dynamic range a track had. There was no reason to "add" dynamic range (not that it could be or was even possible) to something that was already dynamic in the first place. But putting out a track on vinyl (the main distribution medium of the time) that looked like a cardboard box would never fly hence the restrictions that had to be adhered to in order to make proper vinyl distribution happen. I can play back captures of simply normalized vinyl mixes that sound fine when played back on so-called low-midrange "modern" playback setups or even ear buds. Might have to turn up the volume control a bit but once you have that level established the clarity of the mix is still there. Something that is NOT present with modern techniques at all. I never use "auto leveling" playback systems or will disable that "feature" on whatever medium I would be listening to.

 

Last edited: Jan 3, 2026 at 10:58 PM

its not over t'ill its over ...since there are many still that overdue and this sis surely happening in electronic genre it must be reminded to the masses that "loud" is shi** ...as good as a track can be, the loudness can ruin it, the only systems that should be allowed to make music loud is the amplifiers to the speakers ...even plugins devs should be developing stuff with this in mind

 

one of the most recent MWTM videos is Jaycen Joshua going over Ed Sheeran's Take Me Back To London mix, and he talks about this a little bit right in the intro actually. He actually points to one record which I'd never really heard done before. The track is Taio Cruz Dynamite, which was engineered by Serban and Dr. Luke. I thought it was interesting to see him mention one specific track to blame (or credit) about it.

 

Judging purely by ear, I have the impression that in the analog era microdynamics tended to be more squashed, while macrodynamics were preserved to a greater extent. For example, a bass part often seems to have very little dynamic range at the tracking stage, yet its level would rise or fall noticeably from section to section through fader rides during mixing. I assume this was partly due to accidental (but musically beneficial) saturation introduced by electrical components such as transformers, encoders, and similar circuitry.

I also have the impression that, in the digital era, many engineers (especially those working with struggling artists, in underdeveloped countries, or in non-mainstream genres) had to invent new ways to achieve the kind of "glued" microdynamics that came naturally in the analog days, and often couldn’t quite pull it off. As a result, on some "poorer" records from the 1990s you find almost the opposite situation: very detailed microdynamics paired with heavily squashed macrodynamics... like less use of crescendos, fewer quiet intros or bombastic codas, less silence, and fewer quiet tails.

I may be completely off, though. It’s just my impression as a listener.