Rolling Stone recently ran an article called The Death of High Fidelity: In the age of MP3s, sound quality is worse than ever. The article puts the buzz of “The Loudness War” of the audio enthusiasts into a mainstream magazine. While there have been plenty of articles already published in more audio-enthusiasts magazines, this article should run across the desk of every major record label executive in the industry.

The battle between artistic integrity and commercial success is a fine line that can be difficult to walk. Working in the video production service industry, you quickly learn that the client is always right. You could whip up a finely crafted website design, or a motion storyboard of a commercial, and if your vision doesn’t meet the client’s vision, that spot you just spent all night cutting means nothing.

This is the current state (the last 30 years) of the music recording industry. Mastering engineers, who represent the “artists” in this scenario, are the people responsible for putting the technical fine-tunings on every track of a CD. (That description does no justice to their technical knowledge, since most mastering engineers would make your head spin with audio jargon.) These guys are at war with record labels executives over how music should sound, or instead be “experienced” by the listener.

Unfortunately, the article doesn’t shed any new light on the loudness war. The author doesn’t make any call to action, instead letting the engineers do the talking where they talk as if it’s a battle that can no longer be won. There is no reaction from anyone representing a label, making it feel a bit one-sided.

How the article pertains to concert recording

Live music, when experienced in person, does not suffer from the same brick-walling effect that recent CD music suffers from. The loudness is all part of the show, and you are allowed to really feel the music. The instruments sound alive. The experience taps into the psychoacoustic rhythm of the heart. The low-end speakers that hit you in the chest with every thump of the kick drum. This is why we love live music.

As digital media consumption has become mainstream over the last ten years, more labels are finding that concert films and bonus DVDs containing live video are valuable assets to generating not only additional revenue, but gaining additional exposure.

Then comes the task of capturing this live energy and bringing it to web, CD or DVD, where listeners have come to expect to be abused by the loudness of CDs.

When mixing a live show for release, I like to keep the music feeling live. This means mixing in a good part of the room mics and letting the recordings from the console fill-in the clarity of each instrument and to fine-tune balance of the mix.

A lot of concert recording engineers (or their producers at the label) like to shoot for a studio-session live performance, where the “live sound” of the room acoustics isn’t so much added to the final mix. Instead the final mix comes out sounding like a bloated mess.

There are exceptions, of course. Metallica’s S & M live album is one that I constantly reference, as it blends metal and a live orchestra, two genres of music that rarely share the same stage. Then there’s Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall which is an amazing live jazz recording from 2005.

How our work compares

While we try to preserve as much of the dynamic range as possible in our concert work, it is inevitable that we use compression and other mix techniques to bring up the volume of the music. The release medium is what really dictates the amount of compression and maximization used.

A commercial CD release will require more compression, as people will listen to their music in any number of environments (iPod, car stereo, home stereo.) When we mix for 5.1 surround or DTS, where the listener will have nicer equipment, we can use less compression and let the mix breathe, keeping more of the original characteristics of the recorded audio.

Here is a sample of a live mix I’m working on right now which is intended for being synced to a video mix as a 2.0 stereo track. The band is dredg, and the show was recorded in October 2007 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, CA.

Download MP3 Here [10MB, 5:26]

Categories: Concert Films, New Media, Productions, Screening Room