Wednesday, October 15, 2008

I was misquoted in a recent Wall Street Journal article about the level of the new Metallica CD and download and I wanted to set the record straight.

The WSJ author quoted me as saying "But digital technology made it possible to squeeze all of the sound into a narrow, high-volume range. In addition, music now is often optimized for play on the relatively low-fidelity earbuds for iPods, reducing incentives to offer a broad dynamic range."

No music that I master is "optimized for play on the relatively low-fidelity earbuds for iPods". There is no need to do this. Many people have wisely invested in higher quality earbuds and their playback sound is excellent. I don't know where he invented this. I always offer to fact-check what writers write (without changing their editorial point of view) because so many of them screw up. Needless to say the WSJ did not run this by me. 

In addition, elsewhere in the article, the Wall Street Journal author says "That means if you play a newly released CD right after one that's 15 years old, leaving the volume knob untouched, the new one is likely to sound four to eight times as loud." The Metallica album is a good 10dB louder than an older CD. This means it is twice as loud, certainly no where near 4 or 8 times as loud!

It is just very sloppy.