The Jan Diaries — From Mandy Parnell to the Mona Lisa

Red Bull Hrvatska · The Jan Diaries · 11 October 2018

In its fourth week The Jan Diaries turned technical. After mastering engineer Mandy Parnell’s lecture at the Red Bull Music Academy in Berlin, Jan Kinčl wrote the series’ first proper explainer: what the loudness wars are, and why a Depeche Mode CD he bought in 2005 — Playing The Angel — sounded unnaturally loud, crowded and airless to him.

What the piece covers

Kinčl builds the argument patiently. Music, like painting, depends on hierarchy — the Mona Lisa works because the subject sits in front and the background stays behind — and dynamics are what carry a piece’s emotion through time. For proof he sends readers to Miles Davis’s Concierto de Aranjuez from Sketches of Spain, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and Beethoven’s Fifth. Then comes the industry side: mastering as the final stop before a record is pressed, and engineers pushed by clients who wanted their track louder because someone else’s sounded better on the radio — until loudness was being bought with dynamics, detail and quality.

The centrepiece is a waveform comparison of three Depeche Mode songs across two decades: A Question of Time from 1986, Mercy in You from 1993 and Precious from 2005, the last one visibly flattened into a brick. Metallica’s Death Magnetic from 2008 appears as the cautionary tale that finally made the industry pay attention.

The part that stayed

The ending is optimistic. Streaming services — iTunes, YouTube, Spotify — now normalise loudness, so squashed masters simply play quieter, and the incentive that drove the war is dying out. As the model of how to do it right, Kinčl points to Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, winner of five Grammys including Best Engineered Album, and quotes its chief engineer Mick Guzauski: “we never tried to make it loud and I think it sounds better for it”.