The loudness war seems to have been a temporary problem, prevalent mostly because music was primarily listened as downloads of individual files or small collections of files.
Music streaming services have since become a very important music listening medium. Spotify, Google Music, Apple Music and others do normalization of these loudness levels. This neutralizes the loudness wars as it makes loudness wars treatment of music useless, at least when listened on streaming services [1]. Music mastered in the loudness war will still have problems with dynamic range but the perverse motivations causing the war are simply not as relevant for new music.
I agree the loudness war was a huge problem a few years ago, but changing trends in the ways music is being listened to is solving it. The way you present the loudness war problem is therefore somewhat out of touch.
The loudness war is a matter of degree. Sure, steps have been taken so that we maybe won't see another Death Magnetic where the compression has resulted in outright ear-bleeding distortion. But when most music today is listened to from portable devices in loud environments, it’s hard to believe that we are ever again going back to the level of dynamic range common before the loudness war. As I said, even some classical music (and jazz) labels are now issuing their music with considerably limited dynamic range, and a dynamic range as ample as it traditionally was is available only to those who buy the SACD (and listen to the SACD layer of a hybrid SACD, not the CD layer) or the high-resolution download.
Add to this the 'Bass arms race' happening in the past 15 years.
It is especially noticeable if one listens to "modern" vs older CDs vs the radio. I suppose Producers now feel compelled to exercise subwoofers and thump the audience, or compensate for crappy earbuds in the target audience, or maybe that's just what people want because even radio commercials are complicit -- it's difficult to listen to someone talk with "thump/thump/thump" drumbeats in the background. Often, I simply turn it off.
In my car, I have the bass response dialed back by about 50%, and even dip the mid-range by about 15% to get what sounds to my ears like a flat response.
I have mild hearing loss from the 250 to 1k range, so my ears are already attenuating the signal -- I can only imagine how "bass heavy" it must sound to someone with normal hearing!
The only thing that any good producer feels compelled to, is to create the best possible record.
There is nothing inherently good or bad in music production, no timeless rules as to how much treble or bass, compression, distortion, reverb or anything else you need. It has all been done to the extreme and what is deemed good is subject to constant change.
Sometimes car head units have an undocumented bass and treble boost, so flat per the settings on the unit is far from flat. The kinds of compensations you are making get the unit closer to flat when it is a unit of configured with undocumented tuning. You could measure your head unit to find out.
The loudness war was great. I totally appreciate the extremes it reached and the new music production techniques that were developed in response. Some utterly squashed, distorted albums like The Prodigy's Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned are masterpieces. Same goes for some 10-15 year old Mr. Oizo, SebastiAn albums. Over-compression can be very aesthetic. Dynamic range is overrated...
Some people like it (obviously, the "loudness war" would've never occurred if it didn't work commercially), some people don't.
My personal example of a song where it doesn't work is Johnny Cash's "Hurt". Around 3 minutes into the song, Johnny Cash's vocal noticeably distorts. From my perspective, the distortion is absolutely a loudness war phenomenon: if you look at the waveform in an editor, the song starts off pretty "hot" given that there's a very noticeable crescendos at the end. At the end of the song, where the music is pretty much maxing out, there is no bandwidth left. There is no other option to stand out but to push Johnny's voice to distortion.
I've seen people in message boards say the distortion in the vocals adds "intensity". Personally, I'd love to see an un-Loudness War version where Johnny Cash gets several dB more to cleanly sing over the music. Where dynamics, not distortion, is what is driving the intensity. For my tastes, it would be much preferred.
50 cent get rich or die trying is an excellent example of a poorly mastered album produced around the same time as well, vocals distorted throughout almost (if not) the entire album. I can't even imagine what the engineers were thinking when recording these, similar to the overuse of autotune in country these days - see george straight - cowboy walks away
I have to say that (IMHO) Prodigy went over the top with that on The Day Is My Enemy. Thing is you can hear it on the tails of the crash cymbals, you can hear them get ducked in a "stuttery" manner when the compression from the drums hits. Actually, great production technique should be able to work around that and make it both loud without messing up the cymbal tails (or maybe just truncate them, just not have them stutter).
I found the album a bit tiring to listen to because of the continuous loudness. No particular parts really stood out to me, because everything was just sort of loud and it just seemed to go in one ear, out the other. I could pay real close attention, one can always listen better :) But again it is a bit tiring and you can't do much else.
Then again, I just really prefer their first 2-3 albums, which have quite a different sound altogether.
And I'm curious which Oizo albums you're referring to? I love his stuff, and yes some of his tracks are quite loud, (but not all the time, the whole track), but they never quite struck me as a typical "loudness war" type of loudness. Unless I'm thinking of the wrong tracks here (No Day Massacre? Last Night a DJ Killed My Dog?), he seems to like to hit a well sound-designed overdriven bass buzz, with not too much else playing at the same time (and where it does, close attention to envelopes, cutting off hits, ms transient timings) if you do that right and just normalize to max amplitude, you're 95% of the way there (at which point my experience is that compression on top of that usually fucks up that careful detail work, but maybe I need more practice or a different plugin). Possibly I'm thinking of the wrong tracks here, at least you gave me an reason to re-listen his stuff with a different ear/attention (loudness sound-design), which is always interesting :)
It's a genre thing. Lotta dance music these days sounds wrong if it doesn't have the particular distortion of overdoing the hard limiter. Like rock'n'roll without distortion on the guitar.
Music streaming services have since become a very important music listening medium. Spotify, Google Music, Apple Music and others do normalization of these loudness levels. This neutralizes the loudness wars as it makes loudness wars treatment of music useless, at least when listened on streaming services [1]. Music mastered in the loudness war will still have problems with dynamic range but the perverse motivations causing the war are simply not as relevant for new music.
I agree the loudness war was a huge problem a few years ago, but changing trends in the ways music is being listened to is solving it. The way you present the loudness war problem is therefore somewhat out of touch.
[1]: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywgeek/why-spotif...