The Need to Panic: the disease 'Loudness War' is spreading!

Introduction

Hello again my little Darlings! Today I will stand witness, not for the prosecution but for crimes against good audio quality. I will present proof that something that once was healthy now suffers from an illness so severe that no one knows if it will ever be able to recover again. The "something" this article is about is called audio quality and the illness it currently suffers from has been known for decades as 'Loudness War'. Besides presenting numerous examples I also argue that this 'Loudness War' is partly responsible for declining sales of published music (-> CDs, downloads, etc.) and that it´s a crime against peoples' nerves by producing static. A true disgrace to the technical capabilities of the CD format and its possible achievable dynamic music produced right now exhibits a limited dynamic range comparable to the Edison cylinder from 1909. Roughly 15 years ago this illness was mainly contained in the country of "Pop/Rock/Rap/Soul" but in recent years has been spreading into the land of "Scores/Classic/Jazz". Like many other diseases it behaves without intelligence or emotion, its only motivation is greed. Symptoms are as follows:

• brickwall limiting
• awkward frequency response
• audible distortions
• absence of natural dynamic
• 'life' seems drained out of the music

The ultimate fate of patients affected is death causing in turn the demise of the music industry as we know it. Not all of the symptoms above need to be present though in order for the patient to be described as being suffering from 'Loudness War'. Another thing: as with every other malady mild and severe cases need to be distinguished. The patients used as examples will be subjects recently exposed to this abnormal condition, furthermore these patients will come solely from the land 'Scores'. So let´s start by having a look at two subjects where one is not affected and the other one is:

Subject 1: 'Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Rings' - not affected

Subject 2: 'The Dark Knight Rises' - severely affected (already treated with "ReplayGain" here)

Compare the two individuals above: Subject 1 (Birthdate: 2001) doesn´t show any signs of the horrible disease, dynamic peaks are intact, loud parts of the music are loud but not brickwall limited while soft parts are delicate. Frequency response (not pictured) behaves completely natural. Subject 2 (Birthdate: 2012) shows strong signs of brickwall limiting, absence of natural dynamic and an awkward frequency response (pictured further below).

History of the Illness

What are you saying? I´ve been too fast? Where does the disease come from, you want to know... Well, it has been in existence for quite some time. It first emerged in the '60s in an attempt to make music as loud as possible considering the very limited abilities of the then-in-use vinyl distribution format. First Phil Spector and then Motown Records tried to squeeze out every single bit of Loudness in order for their products to be perceived better than others while also combating the poor high frequency performance of then present radio. This continued for a while and wasn´t remotely as severe as it is today - the technical gadgets available to us today were simply not existing all those years ago. Surprisingly, when the CD was introduced in 1982 the affliction turned dormant for a while, probably because people had to learn how to work with a digital (absolute) format. But at the beginning of the '90s the 'Loudness War' returned with an unparallelled force and it has been worsening ever since. More and more people are reporting rather extreme cases that even got mentionend in articles from mainstream magazines.
Who is responsible? I call them Men In Suits (abbreviated as MIS) who mostly are managers (-> investors / bosses), their natural habitat being the executive floor in huge buildings containing the offices of music publishing businesses like Sony Music, Universal or EMI. These MIS firmly believe that something that is louder will be bought by more people, hence will be generating more profit so that they can purchase another Porsche. They hide their desire for profit under a decent looking mask and say sentences like "The public wants it so". In their defense they actually have a tiny point: if out of two musical objects one is louder than the other the louder one will be perceived as sounding better, this has something to do with how our ear works. Of course, MIS are using this fact soleley to hide their greed. Anyway, Mastering Engineers (abbreviated as ME) are the poor blokes ending up spreading the desease, sucking every dynamic out of recordings and turning them into frightful sounding monsters. They are actually fully aware of what they are doing, all the while claiming that they are unable to do something about it.

Examples

Now back to the symptoms, shall we? As described above brickwall limiting and dynamic mutilation are not the only things 'Loudness War' does to audio quality. Another very audible symptom are strange frequency responses prompting equally strange reactions in listeners. In an effort to sound well on an iPod or a cellphone the overall frequency response has been changed into something that barely resembles natural sound. How would an ideal frequency response look like? Well, it would have the form of a curve decreasing towards higher frequencies. A curve like that takes into account how us humans perceive sound: low frequencies (bass) can only be perceived with great difficulty by our ear, higher frequencies (treble) are less of a problem. At the same time our ear can hear exceptionally well at frequencies in the middle (1.000 to 3.000 Hz). Recordings not affected by the health impairment adhere to this concept not by countering our hearing sensivity but by presenting a pleasing overall sonic package. Have a look at two examples:

A perfect and idealized frequency response

Subject 3: 'Superman Returns' - extremely close to the ideal above

You can see how gradually the curve declines towards high frequencies. You can also see that Subject 3 'Superman Returns' (Birthdate: 2006) and its frequency response match the idealized response almost perfectly. The only exceptions are missing deep bass below 65 Hz, rendering the perceived sound to be "faster", and a little bump at roughly 14.000 Hz. That 'mountain' is responsible for the amount of air this score presents. Bumps or "Mountains" as small as these represent a clever method to infuse audio quality with something of a "sonic character". Following now are two examples of subjects suffering from an extreme case of frequency distortion with their condition being critical:

Subject 4: 'Salt' - critical deviations

Subject 2 again: 'The Dark Knight Rises' - awful

Subject 4 (Birthdate: 2010) is able to serve as a very prominent example how serious 'Loudness War' can affect audio quality. The deviations in frequency response cause such unbearable suffering for the patient that even its description prooves problematic. Bass and treble are extremely exaggerated while the mids are recessed. Frequencies around 1.000 Hz  on the other hand are amplified to counter the extreme gain at both frequency ends. Combine that with the effects of excessive brickwall limiting (not pictured) and you are watching a patient being close to death. A skeptical person might now argue that this frequency response is caused by the many synthesizers, drum pads and samplers employed for the production of this score. But one listen to the score crushes this otherwise valid argument because in places where the pure orchestra can be heard the response still presents itself as being heavily distorted. The effect on listeners is an audio quality that is shrill, piercing, lifeless, colourless and extremely unnerving. The medical state of Subject 2 is not that critical. Instead of sounding piercing it "only" sounds shrill, dull, flat and full of 'droning' bass, in short, equally unnerving. But not all is bad in the land of scores because even now there are still a few exceptions around suffering only from mild or serious but stable cases of 'Loudness War':

Subject 5: 'The Bourne Legacy' - stable

Subject 5 is dynamically not as healthy as its frequency response

Subject 6: 'The Amazing Spider-Man' - a healthy patient

Subject 6 is also dynamically in good health with only slight limiting

Subject 5 (Birthdate: 2012) presents an interesting case: while it may look like a serious affection on paper it isn´t like that in reality. This score is perfectly suited for comparison to Subject 4 ('Salt') because both movies contain similar themes, their music similar orchestration and the same amount of artificial elements. Additionally, both scores are composed and engineered by the very same persons (James Newton Howard (composing) and Shawn Murphy (engineering)). In case of Subject 5 however the frequency response is actually pretty balanced, the artificial elements are well integrated and sound non-intrusive. The slight imperfections can be treated fairly easy with an equalizer, just as well as its dynamic compression can be removed with another medicine that will be mentionend later in the section "Therapy".
Not many words need to be spend on Subject 6 (Birthdate: 2012) since it appears to be in very good health with the result that it sounds exceptionally well (A sidenote: Dear producers, composers and engineers - yes, I know that you read my blog - a review from me can be simple and positive as evidenced by those two words).

Subject 7: 'The Avengers' - an interesting case

Subject 8: 'Snow White and the Huntsman' - more or less affected like Subject 5

Subject 7 (Birthdate: 2012) is a very interesting case because it deviates in an entirely different direction by decreasing high frequencies even further, resulting in a warm and voluptuous sonic character. Apart from having the brickwall limiting symptom it showcases a very well designed and characteristic audio quality. Subject 8 (Birthdate: 2012) is an example of a patient not unlike Subject 5 ('The Bourne Legacy') with the exception that bass is much too strong and frequencies around 2.000 Hz have too much power (again to counter the strong bass). Like Subject 5 this can be treated fairly well with several medicines.

Subject 9: 'The Shadow' - a frequency response infused with character

Now let´s have a look at scores being called "remastered", the score for 'The Shadow' serving as an example for all other releases by small independent labels, in this case Intrada. A remaster can be described as something akin to the rebirth of a score, occasionally it´s easier to just re-create a patient instead of prescribing medicine to get rid of the symptoms. In many cases however "remastering" means: "make it louder". The potential buyer expects of course that the last, yet unheard detail may be uncovered... but in 90% of all cases he/she is sadly wrong. Ironically, with every current remastering the patients' condition gets more critical by adding more treble, bass and gain. Subject 9 (Birthdate: 1994, Rebirth: 2012) luckily isn´t such a case; it shows a complete lack of brickwall limiting (not pictured) and a characteristic frequency response caused by the employment of synthesizers which are producing strange noises working within the sonic context. In fact, overall audio quality is fairly high and has been improved over the first release from 1994. That one suffered from analogue, dynamic compression producing 'pumping' artifacts which are nowhere to be found here. This is a rebirth where you have MORE dynamic range than before. In my opinion the frequency response could have been a bit more on the warm side for the rebirth since a more voluptuous sound would have suited the golden tinted atmosphere of the score better. Of course, this is complaining on an extremely high level because this score has been treated very, very well during its rebirth.

Effects

During my introduction I´ve already stated some of the effects afflicted patients may have on listeners. Effects can be cumulative though that isn´t always the case. They are as follows:

• listening fatigue
• headaches
• ringing ears
• bleeding ears (unconfirmed)
• heightened anger
• high blood pressure
• wrecked nerves

The most interesting effect would be listening fatigue. How to measure if someone is affected by it? Do we really know that 'Loudness War' affected patients are the cause for creating fatigue for the listener? Before we talk about it we need to distinguish between psychological fatigue and physical fatigue. The first one is predicated on the perception of Loudness by the listener only. The latter one can be caused by two things: mechanical fatigue and biochemical fatigue. As suggested by James D. Johnston in his article "Listener Fatigue and Longevity" outer hair cells might be depolarized if exposed to high loudness over certain periods of time. Secondary, the inner hair cell firing rate is proportional to loudness, meaning that if something has more loudness our ear starts to protect itself by decreasing the amount of information it is sending to the brain.
Psychological or cognitive fatigue is more difficult to describe because it´s hard to measure. But it´s safe to say that with speech signals multiband compression flattens the signal and causes a loss of articulation, prompting the brain to work harder to process the information. Dynamically compressed transients contained in recordings affected by the 'Loudness War' crush the leading edge of the signal, thereby reducing intelligibility and again forcing the listener working hard to understand its content. On the other hand, slower dynamic compression motivates the listener to regard the music playing right now as background music - it will be tuned out and ignored because it isn´t a cognitive challenge anymore (not to be confused with the aforementionend challenge of increased processing power). All of this turnes music into noise. Rip Rowan described it transparently in his article "Over the Limit":

"WHY IS THE LOUDER IS BETTER APPROACH THE WRONG APPROACH? BECAUSE WHEN ALL OF THE SIGNAL IS AT THE MAXIMUM LEVEL, THEN THERE IS NO WAY FOR THE SIGNAL TO HAVE ANY PUNCH. THE WHOLE THING COMES SCREAMING AT YOU LIKE A MESSAGE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. AS WE ALL KNOW, WHEN YOU TYPE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS THERE ARE NO CUES TO HELP THE BRAIN MAKE SENSE OF THE SIGNAL, AND THE MIND TIRES QUICKLY OF TRYING TO PROCESS WHAT IS, BASICALLY, WHITE NOISE. LIKEWISE, A SIGNAL THAT JUST PEGS THE METERS CAUSES THE BRAIN TO REACT AS THOUGH IT IS BEING FED WHITE NOISE. WE SIMPLY FILTER IT AND QUIT TRYING TO PROCESS IT."

Another result that you need to look at: the decline of sales for the music industry. Have you noticed the recent increase in sales for the old, very outdated vinyl format? It has been stated for example by Kristina Dell in a Time Magazine article that the perceived "warmer" sound of vinyl might have to do something with the necessity of using finesse during mastering in order to work around vinyl's physical limitations regarding signal level. Compare that to the brutal sledgehammer approach applied to CDs. Declining sales happened at roughly the same time as the Loudness of CDs went to extreme levels. The big labels (--> Sony, Universal, EMI, etc.) won´t hear any of it, for them the culprit causing declining sales is easily identified as being a filesharer.
They do have a point: sales have been declining since the year 2000, the same time when mp3 and filesharing rose to mainstream prominence. Since it´s then easy to come to the filesharers-are-guilty conclusion the result was that they were starting to lobby for stronger rights enforcement. But as ME Bob Ludwig states: "People talk about downloads hurting record sales. I and some other people would submit that another thing that is hurting record sales these days is the fact that they are so compressed that the ear just gets tired of it. When you're through listening to a whole album of this highly compressed music, your ear is fatigued. You may have enjoyed the music but you don't really feel like going back and listening to it again.".
So our subconscious (hello Sigmund) might be responsible for diminishing sales since it obvisously cannot stand 'Loudness War' affected patients anymore. When we stretch this argument to its logical conclusion it´s safe to say that 'Loudness War' is a danger to the artform 'music' itself. Contrast (dynamic) creates tension, an intellectual and emotional challenge if you will, if one removes that you are left with garbage that formerly was art. Another opinion to support the theory of diminishing financial returns caused by 'Loudness War' comes from ME Bob Speer, who wrote in 2001 that "The record labels blame digital downloads, MP3s, CD burners, and others for the lack of CD sales. While there is some truth to their constant whining, they only have themselves to blame for the steady decline in CD sales. The record labels need to reevaluate what they consider to be good music. Much of the music being produced today isn't music at all. It's best described as anti-music. It's anti-music because the life is being squashed out of it through over compression during the tracking, mixing, and mastering stages. (...) It's no wonder that consumers don't want to pay for the CDs being produced today. They're over priced and they sound bad."
Additionally, Nick Southall wrote in 2006 that "Compression will continue to be abused in the pursuit of loudness for as long as the recording industry believes that louder shifts units (...) Global album sales are falling year-on-year, far less mega-million-selling records are occurring (...) and I think this is because the clamour to make music louder has made it less loveable, and in the long run loveable sells more." I´m afraid that his call for action won´t reach the people responsible for it. As the recent financial crisis has shown managers in charge of multi-million-dollar companies are rarely interested in long term profit. They strive for an easy success, achievable during a short time period (this is actually taught in college).
All these theories and opinions are supported by the Evergreen Project. There the author Chris Johnson visually analyzed spectograms from a number of the most commercially successful albums; he found out that "the more strongly they sell, the more likely it is that they will have High Contrast characteristics," meaning a wide dynamic range. In particular, speaking about the album 'Greatest Hits 1971-1975' by The Eagles he continues that "it is gratifying, but unsurprising, to discover that the single most commercially important album in RIAA history contains some of the most striking dynamic contrasts pop music's ever seen."

Granted, he talks about pop music there - but if 'Loudness War' is bad for pop how much more difficult might the situation be regarding filmscores? Those consist of recordings made with an orchestra and while slight dynamic compression always has been a part of the sound of Rock/Pop/Soul music this can´t be applied that easily to orchestral recordings. On natural instruments dynamic compression tends to be very audible since it destroys timbre and character, it simply removes microdynamics vital for recognizing them. These instruments are part of the orchestration that most of the time has been carefully fleshed out - effectively dynamic compression or brickwall limiting destroys the message of the music, as a result rendering it unsuited for the movie it was written for - shouldn´t that be avoided?

Therapy

Medicating the aformentionend patients in critical condition for symptoms of 'Loudness War' is not easy and involves spending some time with them in order to ease their suffering. Therapy consists of a lot of research and also bears the risk of hurting them even further by destroying their data integrity. Naturally, another risk is the possibility of prescribing the wrong medicine. Of equally high importance is the amount of medicine to be dosed - too much of the treatment might destroy the subjects' sonic character, e.g. render it even more unrecognizable than before. Nevertheless, treatments so far available are:

• ReplayGain as a starting point
• declipping (for example with iZotope's DeClipper)
• ReLife (Terry West Productions)
• re-processing individual channels for battling stage symptoms (for example PLParEQ)
• re-equalization (for example with iZotope's Ozone)
• repairing stereo field with multiband stereo imaging (iZotope Ozone again)

As you can guess those treatments are extremely expensive. Luckily, not all of them need to be administered in every case. Physicians may therefore apply treatment as they deem necessary after extensive study of the patients' medical condition. A few examples of successful cases are presented as follows:

Remember Subject 4 ('Salt') - before treatment

Subject 4 after treatment

As you can see above on the before treatment / after treatment charts, Subject 4 has been eased of its pain: Amplficiation of frequencies around 11.000 Hz has been reduced considerably as well as the overbearing bass response while mids and presence area have been strengthened. The therapy also got rid of the effects of brickwall limiting by eliminating it completely. All in all, I can say that treatment has been a success - people listening to Subject 4 aren´t complaining anymore of headaches or bleeding ears, they now are actually able to recognize the music in a non-fatiguing way.

Subject 2 ('The Dark Knight Rises') before treatment

Subject 2 after treatment

The same is valid for Subject 2. You can see how much the overpowering, 'droning' bass has been reduced, as a result presenting sonic colours for the first time. Mids around 1.000 Hz have been strengthened, the same goes for higher frequencies at roughly 4.800 Hz. The amount of amplifications at 3.000 Hz has been straightened out as well. Sadly, the symptoms for Brickwall limiting (not pictured) couldn´t be rectified completely but at least ReLife was successful in easing them greatly.

Conclusions & Opinion

I called this article "The Need to Panic: the disease 'Loudness War' is spreading". You, my beloved constant reader, might think that I´m exaggerating. You might look at the charts and think "The differences look tiny to me, they can´t be as bad as described." Should that be the case I have to tell you that you´re mistaken. While these pictures don´t look like much they contain a powerful statement: gain differences for several frequency bands between 'ill' releases and 'cured' releases happen to be as big as +/- 10 dB (for example on 'Salt' ). Additionally, the effect of transients with natural dynamic can make a difference like night and day. For subjects like 'The Avengers' or 'The Bourne Legacy' the effect of sound being not differentiated may not be that apparent - on subjects like 'The Dark Knight Rises' or 'Salt' they indeed are easily recognizable and they of all are in desperate need of being cured. If I´m extrapolating the examples given here to the entire soundtrack market it leaves us with 50% of all scores sounding well enough while the other 50% are nothing more than distorted audio garbage sounding like a Wax cylinder from 1909.

Most of the time that crap (sorry) is unleashed to the public by the big majors (--> Sony, Universal, EMI) while smaller and independent labels like Intrada or LaLaLand generally are releasing the "good", unaffected half (with some exceptions). Just for the sake of argument let´s expand this situation further into the even bigger market of mainstream releases. How can people treat 'Loudness War' affected releases with respect if even their creators won´t? What if not only filesharers were responsible as it is so often stated by the music industry? What if the 'Loudness War' had an effect too? This would be quite ironic: cranking up the volume was done in order to boost sales and not for the opposite to happen. Is it just a coincidence that sales degenerated at the same time when music got extremely loud? The big labels won´t finance research into that matter - regarding every consumer as a potential thief is much cheaper and easier. (A Sidenote: I´m not defending filesharers here - but that argument alone is insufficient). Furthermore, trying not to make music louder would require balls, something those managers or financial advisors seem to lack considering the absence of daring decisions. I can tell you this though: I have stopped buying mainstream releases because they sound like shit. I´m not even downloading them illegally. While they might be available for free at some place on the net they still sound like shit. I can also promise you that I will stop buying score releases coming from major lables if their sound quality continues to be as bad as it is now, they are a disgrace to the technical possibilities the CD offers and I won´t accept music that has been destroyed on purpose. Right now I´m buying roughly 70 CDs, SACDs or digital downloads every year (not even including DVD's or BluRay's), most of them being scores and classical music - but I cannot guarantee that this will continue indefinetely.

Enough with the ranting. I could go on and talk about mastering engineers saying "No" to 'Loudness War' even if that would mean getting fewer assignments. As you can see above they are complaning - but are they doing something about it? You may remember the statement from ME Bob Ludwig; considering his opinion it's surprising that he continues to expose music to the disease by cranking up the volume using the excuse of "The customer won´t accept anything else." If he would be true to his word he´d stop taking on those assignments. To be fair to him and others: I´m not sure if I wouldn´t behave like them if I were in their shoes; it´s easy to see oneself as a victim instead of an accomplice - and I have been a victim of my own bigotry in the past too. Anyway, this situation has to stop. An orchestra - not even one augmented by synthesized sound elements - cannot be treated as the next best Pop music release and I just don´t have the patience to 'cure' their diseases. I consciously know about this and can subsequently try to get rid of it - but what about the tens of thousand other people being unaware? They simply stop buying these releases. So I urge the people in charge to act now before you´re broke.

Sources:

experience and 'The Loudness War: Background, Speculations and Recommendations',
Earl Vickers, ST Microelectronics, first released at the 129th AES Convention, 2010

Last update: 16.07.2013

An attempt at "Remastering" - the score to "Hook" serving as an example

EDIT: During the last few days I´ve received numerous complaints about this article. I came across (here and on the FSM forum) as an arrogant and vulgar jerk and I´ve needlessly offended everyone; Bruce Botnick, John Williams, Americans, LaLaLand Records and score collectors, I even uttered racist sentences. I am very sorry for this. I created problems I didn´t want to create and also ridiculed what I was trying to say. The version of this article you´re about to read has therefore been revised to a much less - I hope - offensive state and while editing after publishing is an example of poor form I still had to do it. I would like to thank David Sones who moderates the FSM forum and also my best mate, both made it clear to me that I have been unable to see the bigger picture and that I was navigating myself into a corner I never wanted to be in.



Hello my friends! Since my last article exactly one month has passed and while I´m sorry that I needed so long to write another one I tend to think that I used this time quite well. I´ve acquired several additional portable CD players (including a legend and a surprise - review to follow), did something incredibly stupid (will also be described in the CD player article) and I´ve purchased some new CDs, soundtracks / filmscores to be exact. Today I´d like to talk about one particular score, the one to the Spielberg directed "Hook". As usual with Steven-Spielberg-directed movies master composer John Williams wrote that score and among fans it rightfully ranges as one of the best efforts Mr. Williams achieved during his very long career. It often pops up in "Best-of" lists, you may remember that I too mentionend it in my own "Best sounding scores of all time" list. I included it because the original CD from 1991 sounds so wonderful and perfect, it truly is one of engineer Shawn Murphy's (many) outstanding efforts. Still, this CD wasn´t complete and for us score collectors a lot of the music we heard in the movie was missing, regardless of its more than generous 70 minutes runtime. You see, John Williams had written roughly 130 minutes of music, not including alternates, songs and early versions for the ultimately unrealized musical version that was planned originally.

The first release (1991, Epix Soundtracks, copyright by Sony Music)

While it´s fairly common not to release everything that has been written for a filmscore (because of redundancy or musician's fees) fans were disappointed nevertheless by what had been left out. Not surprisingly roughly ten years later or so a bootleg surfaced, which - as is common with bootlegs - suffered from very bad sound quality. Finally in 2012 the pleading of us score fans was answered and an official and completely new release was unveiled by the label LaLaLand Records with a lot of help by Sony Music. They took the greatest care in assembling this 2-CD-Release, even John Williams himself participated in its assembly - and he rarely embraces expanded releases of his scores and it´s even rarer for him to take part in their creation. Everyone involved seemed to make sure to create the best version possible which probably wasn´t easy at all. I recommend to read the interview with producer Didier C. Deutsch, it´s very enlighting in regard to the problems producers of these releases sometimes have to face. In any case, I was very excited since "Hook" has been one of the first scores I ever bought and it has been partly responsible for musical preferences I have today. But not only my musical tastes were shaped by it, no, it also shaped my sound preferences because its sound shows true reference qualitites. You can imagine that I was very excited to have the possibility to own the expanded version myself - more wonderful music, more wonderful sound. I was eagerly awaiting the day of its arrival and because it was that important to me even my boyfriend took part in my decision to purchase it (he isn´t interested in filmscores and is sometimes ennerved by the scores I listen to with my headphones :)), he subsequently decided to present it to me for the Easter Holidays - a very welcome surprise.

The second release - beautiful, isn´t it? (2012, LaLaLand Records, copyright by Sony Music)

Another surprise awaited me on the day of its arrival: while I adored the additional tracks I´ve until then only known through the movie (I have seen it many times; I own it on DVD) I became irritated about their sound. The tracks I knew from the first CD sound like their old pristine self whereas the new tracks sound a bit different. For sure, their level of sonic perfection is equally high but at the same time they have more bass, treble and an increased amplitude. Example: one minute you get to hear the full orchestra playing Hook's theme in "Presenting the Hook", the next minute an assumed smaller part of the same orchestra follows with higher volume level (roughly 2-3 dB) combined with a slightly different sound signature on the new track "Pirates!". To make a long story short, I was disappointed because I was expecting the perfection I am used to from the first release - what I got instead was sonic inconsitency. An even bigger disappointment were "The Ultimate War"-track: this piece also known from the first CD has been expanded into three seperate, considerably longer tracks with help from a less than pristine source; the producers obviously had to use the score mix prepared for usage in the movie alongside sound effects, dialogue etc., I assume that the original masters for these tracks couldn´t be located. But why does the usage of this score mix pose a problem? For one, this score mix is a copy of the original master, here in this case an analogue copy as evidenced by the drop-outs and slight channel imbalances. Secondly, this mix has to play alongside the rest of the movies' soundtrack with the result that the music changes amplitude constantly; it gets dialed down for dialogue or turned up for action sequences, sometimes in a fraction of a second. Another problem of these tracks is their amount of editing: in an effort to closely mirror the music we knew from the movie the first, formerly pristine half of the "The Ultimate War"-track has been edited, effectively creating loops and awkward jumps in continuity and amplitude. Remember, this was done on a part of the track that formerly was perfectly allright. Additionally they adapted the amplitude of this first half by increasing the volume level in order to match it to the mixed-in moviemix, creating an example of the "Loudness War" as a result and making the whole track another 2-3 dB louder than the rest of the score. Two examples are below:

The whole orchestra playing at full force on "The Ultimate War"
 - brickwall limited in combination with 0 dBfs distortions (clipping)

"Remembering Childhood" - note the part 8:30 to the end: this is the complete orchestra playing
again at full force - with roughly 5 dB less RMS level though. Peaks and dynamics are intact.

While this seems to be bad it isn´t: the three seperate "Ultimate War"-tracks are the only "Loudness War" tracks, the rest is perfectly fine. But I´d like to know if you, dear reader, were disappointed like me or if you don´t mind something like this. Does brickwall limiting combined with clipped 0 dBfs peaks disturb you? I´m of the opinion that maximizing the RMS level doesn´t make sense with purely orchestral scores, it´s not like this music has to compete with Lady Gaga's newest release on the radio. I guess what mystifies me the most is how a release in the year 2012, published by two very experienced and professional companies, with a pristine mastertape as a source, happens to be mastered like this. Usually one of the goals of mastering involves matching the sound of one particular track to the sound of another, possibly different sounding track. This process consists of bringing their respective frequency responses (or sound signatures) and their overall RMS levels with respect to the overall dynamics of the complete work closer together. It seems strange to me that it wasn´t done here, especially when considering how much work went into a spectacular release like this. Possible reasons? I don´t know, I´d be very glad if someone with information would be able to comment on this article in order to shed some light into this.

But what can we do about "Hook", assuming you were disappointed like me? We can try to improve it further by turning it into a more coherent sounding soundtrack CD. To make it easier from now on we`ll use the term "Remastering"; plain wrong and misleading of course since we´ll be doing nothing more than adapting the sound to our own personal taste or what we presume to be correct; what we are certainly not doing is creating a new master because only that would justify the term. But for the sake of convenience let´s just use this imprecise expression, shall we?

In the rest of this article I shall attempt to show you how I "corrected" the shortcomings I´ve talked about, if you want to do the same let me remind you that you should work with good Equalizers, resamplers and DAWs only. I also advise you to work within a bit depth of 32 Bit Floating point; while the guys at hydrogenaudio.org might tell you that it´s unnecessary I disagree since you will be doing lots of processing; working with this bit depth helps to preserve the original resolution and dynamic as close as possible without introducing too much errors. Additionally I also work with a version I upsampled to 176.4 kHz before using EQs or other DSPs because A) I keep the resulting 96 kHz files and B) signal processors are using oversampling - with a higher samplerate I can avoid additional oversampling close to the passband.

These are the tools I used for "Hook":

iZotope RX Advanced, iZotope Ozone 4, Sound Forge Pro 10.0
You don´t have to use them, Audacity is very good too. 
For up- and downsampling I´d also recommend SoX
 - it´s a very good resampler for use within foobar2000

My configurations for iZotope Ozone 4 are following below. I attempted to change equalization and stereo separation beside level changes, both of them are intended to change the new tracks into something that closely resembles the original tracks already known from the 1991 release; their frequency response has not been changed for the new release (apart from noise-shaped dither) so they are serving as the ultimate reference to which all other tracks have to be adapted. My configuration should also be applicable to other equalizers... and don´t worry about using them: they tend to be described by audiophiles (people like me) as coming from the devil himself when in reality they are used on 99% of all releases out there, with them it´s like with all things: it doesn´t matter if you use them, it only matters how. So, still with me? Want to see a world you´ve never seen? Then take my hand for I now will take you down the rabbit hole.

EQ setting for the new parts (except "The Ultimate War") - called "NewTracksEQ"

Stereo separation for the new parts (except "The Ultimate War") - part of the "NewTracksEQ"-setting

EQ setting for the filmmix tracks ("The Ultimate War" etc.)
- called "FilmMixEQ" (yes, these settings are quite severe)

Stereo separation for the filmmix tracks - part of the "FilmMixEQ"-setting

After my suggestions for equalization and stereo separation I´ll now show you where and how they are going to be applied. I came up with the augmented tracklist below during my initial spotting session of the score, I tried to find out the differences while at the same deducing what needed to be done to flatten them out. The tracks I assumed to be in need of change / processing / corrections are marked in bold letters. A warning: some of my suggestions seem - even to me - completely arbitrary because I cannot know the differences exactly, it´s a bit like solving a puzzle. My obsession with perfection however caused me to be as precise as possible by using the "Matching EQ" feature of Ozone in combination with my own experience to work out frequency response differences. Anyhow, I think that my reworked tracks still sound slightly different even though my result now seems to flow very nicely sonically with less audible differences than before. This isn´t an exact science (not in my case) but done by gut feeling only. The level changes for example were "calculated" only by how I think how loud an orchestra utilizing certain players should be at some particular point. Granted, because of years of exposure to orchestral recordings I like to think that I´ve gained some experience but I can never be completely confident, therefore you should regard my suggestions with reasonable doubt. Another point: while I strive to create the perfect version you mustn´t necessarily do the same, if you´re lucky with something else it´s perfectly ok and probably more healthy anyway.

DISC 1

1. Prologue 1:30 (adjusting level for -2 or -3 dB)
2. We Don't Wanna Grow Up 1:50  (adjusting level for -1.5 dB)
3. Banning Back Home 2:25  (adjusting level for -1.5 dB)
4. Granny Wendy 2:57
5. The Bedroom 1:07 ("NewTracksEQ")
6. The Nursery 1:38 ("NewTracksEQ")
7. The Watch :56 ("NewTracksEQ")
8. Hook-Napped 3:56
9. A Portrait Of Wendy 1:06
10. The Arrival Of Tink/The Flight To Neverland 6:03  (from 5:24 "NewTracksEQ")
11. Presenting The Hook 3:01
12. Pirates! 2:41  (adjusting level for -3.0 dB & "NewTracksEQ")
13. Hook Challenges Peter 7:50 (adjusting level for -2 or -3 dB & "NewTracksEQ")
14. From Mermaids To Lost Boys 5:13 (from 4:08 adjusting level for -2.3 dB & "NewTracksEQ")
15. The Lost Boy Chase 3:32
16. Smee's Plan 3:25 (adjusting level for roughly -3 dB & from 1:42 "NewTracksEQ")
17. Pan Is Challenged 1:20 (adjusting level for roughly -3 dB & "NewTracksEQ")
18. Hook's Lesson 3:08 (adjusting level for roughly -3 dB & "NewTracksEQ")
19. The Banquet 3:10
20. The Never-Feast 4:41
21. Hook's Madness 4:00 (adjusting level for roughly -2 dB & "NewTracksEQ")
22. Follow That Shadow 2:38 (adjusting level for roughly -2 dB & "NewTracksEQ")

DISC 2

1. Remembering Childhood 11:04
2. You Are The Pan 4:03 (from 2:26 "NewTracksEQ")
3. When You're Alone 3:16 (adjusting level for -1.5 dB)
4. Tink Grows Up 2:20 ("NewTracksEQ")
5. The Ultimate War: To War 9:45* (up to 2:23 adjusting level for -3 dB, from 2:23 onwards adjusting level for another -2.5 dB - from beginning to 7:50 "NewTracksEQ" & from 7:50 onwards "FilmMixEQ")
6. The Ultimate War: The Death Of Rufio 2:36* (adjusting level for roughly -5 dB & "FilmMixEQ")
7. The Ultimate War: Sword Fight 5:32* (adjusting level for roughly -5 dB & "FilmMixEQ")
8. Farewell Neverland 11:15* (up to 1:01 "FilmMixEQ" & from 1:01 "NewTracksEQ")
9. End Credits 6:08 (adjusting level for roughly -2.5 dB & "FilmMixEQ")
10. Prologue (alternate) 1:35 (adjusting level for roughly -2.5 dB & "NewTracksEQ")
11. Banning Back Home (film version) 3:14* (adjusting level for roughly -2.5 dB & "FilmMixEQ")
12. Presenting The Hook (film version, extended) 4:03 (adjusting level for roughly -2.5 dB & "NewTracksEQ")
13. Hook's Blues 2:17 (adjusting level for roughly -2.5 dB & "NewTracksEQ")
14. Wendy Tells Peter The Truth (partly unused) 2:24 (adjusting level for roughly -2.5 dB & "NewTracksEQ")
15. Exit Music (unused) 1:42 (adjusting level for roughly -2.5 dB & "NewTracksEQ")

* Those tracks show numerous level jumps / distortions - these cannot be corrected with one singular setting, they can only be corrected individually by hand.

All in all it took me four days (or eight consecutive hours) to do this, not counting the final listening session right before the finishing touches (downsampling and/or dithering) in order to spot curiosities I might have overlooked or introduced myself. Luckily, I couldn´t find any. The most daunting part for me was the spotting session and averaging out the level jumps on the filmmix tracks. The latter had to be done entirely by hand, including going back to other parts of the score consisting of (an assumed) similar orchestration & overall amplitude to compare my changes with them as a reasonable reference. My experience came in handy so I think that my result is worthwhile and a slight improvement over the original CDs.

"The Ultimate War" now looks like this - quite different, eh?

So, after all this talk you must be interested in hearing some of my results, aren´t you? Well, lucky you because now I´m going to present fully legal samples from my version compared to the tracks in their original state from my own CDs. As I´ve said, these samples are fully legal, they are under 30 seconds but are nonetheless able to show what I did. Before I forget: my versions are lower in volume (roughly 3-5 dB) so you might want to adapt the volume of your stereo system in order for both versions to be roughly at the same volume level.

Here I removed a loop that wasn´t there before

Corrected volume jumps, overall level and EQ - not perfect but improved

Corrected volume jumps, overall level and EQ - not perfect but improved

Corrected volume jumps, overall level and EQ - not perfect but improved