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Topic: Loudness war, 1960s style! (Read 4841 times) previous topic - next topic
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Loudness war, 1960s style!

See pages 3-4 here...

http://www.collinsaudio.com/Prosound_Workshop/Motown2.pdf

"If they could have made the disc 30dB louder by reducing the play time to 10 seconds, and they could have got away with it, they'd have done it!"
(paraphrasing)

Cheers,
David.

Loudness war, 1960s style!

Reply #1 –
Quote from: 2Bdecided on
See pages 3-4 here...

http://www.collinsaudio.com/Prosound_Workshop/Motown2.pdf

"If they could have made the disc 30dB louder by reducing the play time to 10 seconds, and they could have got away with it, they'd have done it!"
(paraphrasing)

Cheers,
David.

There's nothing new under the sun then...

"Basically, what Motown did was write off [playback stylus mistracking] distortion as the price of doing business.The attitude was that it certainly wasn't worth lowering the recording level."


What a great read, thanks for sharing that

Loudness war, 1960s style!

Reply #2 –
Quote
Distortion didn't bother the decision-makers at all.  And that's an understatement.

What's this?  In The Golden Age of Analogue, the producers et. al weren't concerned with distortion?  They just wanted it as loud as they could get it?  So, you mean, in 2013, the loudness wars might, just might, not be a conspiracy by mastering engineers, but instead just might be the result of the exact same decades-old attitude of their clients and they're just doing their f***ing jobs?

Wow, I never, ever would have thought this to be the case, certainly not from reading several threads here on HA...

Another poignant quote regarding mastering, this from the home page of the Collins Audio website:

Quote
A misunderstood, much maligned, yet vitally important stage in record production.

Indeed.
"Not sure what the question is, but the answer is probably no."

Loudness war, 1960s style!

Reply #3 –
Similarly, according to Wikipedia, which cites Geoff Emerick's Here, There and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles, "The 'Paperback Writer'/'Rain' single [released in June, 1966] was the first release to use a new device invented by the maintenance department at Abbey Road called 'ATOC' for 'Automatic Transient Overload Control'. The new device allowed the record to be cut at a louder volume, louder than any other single up to that time."

Loudness war, 1960s style!

Reply #4 –
I grew up with vinyl in the 60s & 70s.  The sound quality was NOT that good, at least with rock/popular music.  Once in awhile you'd run-across a really "clean" sounding record.  Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, and Steely Dan put-out some of the best that I knew of.  A friend of mine had a Temptations album (Motown I assume) with the song "Masterpiece", and if my memory is correct it also had a "clean" sound.    So I knew that better quality was possible, but the record companies generally didn't seem to care.  Most listeners didn't care either. 

Audiophiles were listening to classical (and maybe jazz) and the record companies seemed to put more care into these recordings/pressings.

When CDs were introduced, it seemed that the record companies started paying attention to frequency response and distortion, and the quality was much more consistant.

Loudness war, 1960s style!

Reply #5 –
In the 1960s, it seems that pop records were cut+pressed to a higher standard in the UK than the USA. I find this first-hand in Beatles LPs I own, but it seems to be common knowledge.

Meanwhile, UK pop record engineers bemoaned the fact that they didn't have the tools used in the USA to make records loud. This point crops up in recollections in various documentaries about the era.

Cheers,
David.