The loudness wars essentially describes the way in which mixing/mastering engineers have attempted to make the music being released louder through the use of aggressive dynamic processing techniques, with the goal of the track being to compete with all the other very loud tracks being released. This is generally agreed to be a negative trend, which reduces the sound quality of recorded music and inevitably leads to a certain degree of clipping being present in most chart tracks, with the majority of chart hits having a true peak of around +1dBTP to +3dBTP. This trend is not about the quality of the music but about getting consumers to pay attention; it is not artistic in any way and is just used to make songs stick out but, as every song is overly loud, it just works to create a brick wall of sound in the music being released. This practice creates a very flat signal and no dynamics in terms of performance. The loudness wars began in 1982 when CD sales began to overtake vinyl sales, this meant that music made before needed to be transferred onto the new medium; digital audio is different from analog audio as it has a more defined maximum amplitude level which led to a level of cautiousness from engineers when working on tracks which allowed for a large amount of headroom. Then in the 1990’s the trend became to be as loud as possible in tracks, with engineers applying more compression and gain to each release. It was during this time that DAW’s were rising in popularity which meant that the use of digital limiting was becoming more commonplace, leading to the use of brick wall limiting which is when it clips the signal just before it reaches the limit.

What’s The Loudness War? (2022) SoundGuys. Available at: https://www.soundguys.com/the-loudness-war-51513/ (Accessed: 08 May 2023)