only at Alexa’s top volume can the notes
even be heard. Then, when the protago-
nist’s fever intensifies to forte and fortis-
simo, the music coming from Alexa again
turns to nonsense—although this time
it’s deafening.
The major streaming services, includ-
ing Amazon, Apple Music, and Spotify,
have tended to address dynamics in classi-
cal music with indifference and bewilder-
ment. In pop music the founding principle of
amplification is Nigel Tufnel’s axiom: These
go to 11. And pop music in digital, post–
aggressive.” On NPR, record-mastering
engineer Bob Ludwig explained how new
techniques diminish the 1989 recording of
Paul McCartney’s “Figure of Eight”: “It really
no longer sounds like a snare drum with
a very sharp attack ... It sounds more like
somebody padding on a piece of leather.”
In classical music, overcompression all
but deletes pianissimo and distorts high
volumes to smithereens. But compression
can also crush subtleties like timbre, the
auditory minutiae that let listeners tell the
sound of a trumpet from that of a trombone,Spinal Tap days is not merely played and
recorded at 11, it’s often heavily compressed,
which reduces the volume range within
individual songs. Soft sounds are boosted
to bring them closer to the loud ones, but
those loud signals are also processed within
an inch of their lives to get them to blow past
peak amplitudes allowed by digital systems.
Only if you change your streaming settings
to high or very high can you begin to hear a
song or piece at near CD quality.
Greg Milner, the author of Perfecting
Sound Forever, has tallied the damage
done to pop recordings by the notorious
Loudness War, which has raged for lo these
40 years. (Troops do seem to be drawing
down lately; we must end endless loudness
wars.) A brief military history: When music
was first digitized for compact discs in the
1980s, engineers set a peak for how big and
loud a signal could be, but over time pro-
ducers found they could push further—and
attract artists determined to drown out the
radio competition. Thus were popularized
signal-processing techniques, including the
dread dynamic-range compression, which
traps music’s range in an ever-tightening
band. Milner puts it this way: “With digital
audio, a few mouse clicks can compress
the dynamic range with brute force. The
result is music that sounds more aurally
and tempo rubato (“stolen time”), which is
the slight speed-up or slow-down of notes
used by soloists or conductors taking lib-
erties with a composition. When you erase
tone color and edit out irregularities in a
classical recording, you’re on your way to
losing the music entirely.
Whether or not contemporary engi-
neering might have some upsides, the loud
all-about-that-bass bass that still largely
dominates pop music is a far cry from the
sonic experience audiophiles used to seek.
In the early 1950s, writing in The New York
Times Magazine, Meyer Berger defined a
“high-fidelity boy” as a “hot-eyed and
intemperate fanatic whose chief pursuit is
not music but extremes in sound—the low-
est booming bass; the highest biting note,
tremblingly caught before it takes off for
infinity.” In those days, the very time that
American pop music fans were discover-
ing both Berlioz and the blues legend Lead
Belly, high dynamic range let them savor
their brand-new and often painfully expen-
sive stereo equipment. Today on the con-
founded Echo, the roller coaster of Berlioz’s
love song sounds closer to the depressive
trudge through love taken by, say, Nirvana.
(Berlioz and Kurt Cobain both took opiates;
maybe their heroiny moods also had dif-
ferent dynamic ranges.)Ultimately, though, listeners make their
choices. A study by the audio software engi-
neer Chris Johnson about why contem-
porary pop-music careers end suddenly
makes a fascinating discovery. Songs that
are uniformly loud and tightly compressed
may sound great on first listening—Oasis’
hypercompressed (What’s the Story) Morn-
ing Glory? was beloved off the blocks—but
listeners soon tire of them. The ear evi-
dently craves excitement; we tend to balk
at listening to them for hours on end.
By contrast, as Johnson found, music
that persists in popularity shows a remark-
ably wide dynamic range. According to
Johnson’s study, records that are success-
ful year in and year out, warhorses like Led
Zeppelin IV or the Eagles’ Their Greatest
Hits (1971-1975), contain some of the most
radical dynamic contrasts in the history of
pop music.
When it comes to range, Symphonie
Fantastique takes it to the limit every bit
as much as the Eagles did, and the piece—
composed 190 years ago and first pressed
into vinyl in 1924—is, by most metrics, a
lasting hit. Similarly, other evergreen clas-
sical compositions, especially the lavishly
romantic ones (Berlioz, Strauss, Debussy,
Dvořák), show breathtaking scope and spa-
ciousness, and have sustained the popularity
they gained as vinyl recordings in the 1950s.
Classical music survived the Loud-
ness War largely because most producers
were conscientious objectors and never
enlisted. Sure, they were already suspi-
cious of reverb and equalizers when the
war broke out, but their resistance goes
back even further. From the earliest days of
stereo recording, the general rule was that
R&B and pop were fair game for manipu-
lation because they were built for impro-
visation at every stage, but, in Berger’s
words, engineers “wouldn’t dare do that
with hopped-up versions of Beethoven,
Brahms, or Bach,” because they have a
“150- to 200-year tradition behind them.”
And so, while the Loudness War may
have wrecked hundreds of pop records,
classical engineers have largely kept their
focus on the art of traditional acoustics
rather than the science of Auto-Tune. For
many, the old ideal of “fidelity” in recorded
music has always had a moral component—
honesty, authenticity, truth. Breakthroughs
in classical engineering are therefore del-
icato: Some control for sibilance, sinceToday on the confounded Echo, the roller
coaster of Berlioz’s love song sounds closer
to the depressive trudge through love
taken by, say, Nirvana.