August 2025

Pump Up The Volume? When Is Loud Too Loud?
Roger Skoff writes about musical and audio dynamics.
Article By Roger Skoff

  Do you know what a piano is? Sure you do; It's big keyboard instrument that you can play music on, and that's been used by everyone from (in nothing like chronological order) Mozart to Franz Liszt (perhaps the first true rock star) to Sergei Rachmaninoff, to Yuja Wang, to "Fats" Domino, to "Fats" Waller, to Elton John, to the neighbor kid who drives you nuts with his awful and incessant practicing next door.

Do you know, though, how a piano got its name? It's not actually just a "piano", but a "pianoforte" – a name derived by combining the two classical music terms for "soft (piano) and "loud" (forte), and it became hugely popular – completely replacing its predecessor, the harpsichord, because, unlike the harpsichord's single volume level, it can be played as loud or as quietly as the player wants, and more easily convey feeling or emotion. (Instead of the "plectra" that a harpsichord uses to pluck its strings – always with the same force – a piano has "hammers" that can strike its strings as hard or as softly as the player wants, and produce whatever volume level may be desired.)

Just the fact that a piano player can not only play whichever notes he wants, but at whatever loudness level he wants, makes for a vastly more "flexible" instrument, and vastly greater creative possibilities. That's why so many composers and songwriters choose a piano to work on when they're writing music.

How loud or how softly an instrument or a piece of music can be played is called its "dynamic range", and, unfortunately, we, as audiophiles and music lovers, are – and have been – faced with declining musical dynamic range for almost as long as there's been recorded music.

A Bit Of Details About Dynamics From Our Creative Director
"Sound Pressure Level (SPL) measures the intensity of sound waves relative to a reference pressure of 20 µPa, expressed logarithmically in decibels (dB). Different weightings—like A-weighting for human hearing sensitivity and C-weighting for low-frequency content—help tailor measurements to specific applications," says Enjoy the Music.com's Creative Director Steven R. Rochlin. "Time weightings such as Fast, Slow, Leq, and Peak capture variations in sound over different time scales, ensuring accurate monitoring of both continuous and impulse noises."

"Audio dynamics describe the range between the quietest and loudest sounds in an environment or recording. Natural settings can span from near-silence (20 dB for a whisper in a forest) to powerful peaks (110 dB for thunder). This dynamic range is crucial for preserving the character of natural soundscapes and for audio systems that must handle both subtle details and sudden transients without distortion. Understanding and controlling SPL and dynamics has practical applications in hearing conservation, audio engineering, and architectural acoustics. Regulations limit prolonged exposure above 85 dB to prevent hearing loss, while sound level meters and calibrated microphones ensure precise measurements for live and studio settings. Acoustic treatments, insulation, and zoning strategies help manage unwanted noise, allowing desired natural dynamics to flourish in both indoor and outdoor spaces."

How It All Started
It started as early as when "cutting a record" meant exactly that: cutting a record by using a sharp piece of metal or a sharpened stone to cut a wiggly groove in a wax cylinder or (later) on a lacquered disc. The number of wiggles per second recorded the frequency of the musical signal, and the width of the "swing" -- how far the cutting stylus (and therefore, the groove) moved from side to side -- recorded its volume level, with more swing being louder and less swing being less loud.

With a recording system like that, producing (on a disc) one long wiggly spiral, how much spiral could be gotten on the disc determined how much signal could be recorded, and that meant that the closer the loops of the spiral could be made, the more recording time could be available.

And that was the beginning of sonic "compression".

Put most simply, the less the difference between the narrowest swing and the widest could be made, the more signal (music or speech) could be put on the record. And that (and, granted, other factors) resulted in the practice of record "equalization" – reducing the volume of the bass on recording and increasing it on playback while doing the opposite to the treble meant three things: First that more time could be put on a recorded disc, second, that, because the bass swings are the greatest, it reduced the likelihood that any two adjacent groove sections could cross each other, and cause distortion or "skipping", and, third, that the treble "de-emphasis" would hide record scratches and surface noise.

Once recordings could be "equalized", it became ever more certain that they would also be "compressed" – made so that the loudest and softest parts of the signal became less and less different – usually al loud as they could be made all the time without sacrificing recording time, at first and still, on popular records, which tend to have less recorded time on them, anyway.

The driving reason for this was, and continues to be, radio. The more people a radio station reaches, the more it can charge its advertisers for commercials, which are, generally, its main source of revenue. The station's "reach" – how broad an area its signal covers and, therefore, the number of people it can play to, is determined by how much power its transmitter puts out. That output, though, is not just limited by the transmitter's capability or its licensed output, but by how loud the signal is that it's broadcasting at any moment; the louder, up to its limit, the more power. Thus, the station's reach can constantly vary by how loud its music is, and that means that radio stations want their music to be as loud as it can be, ALL THE TIME!

And that has had a direct effect on the music: Record companies and recording artists make their money largely based on how many records they sell. How many they sell depends in large part on how many people hear them and want to buy (or stream) them, and for at least pop and rock artists, how many people hear them can be hugely affected by how much radio airplay they get.

And that means that recording engineers and record producers will compress their recordings as much as they can get away with without destroying the music in hope that radio stations will want to play them.

About the only kinds of music that can still be reasonably relied on to have anything like a reasonably natural (uncompressed) dynamic range these days are classical and jazz. For most other genres, audiophiles are taking their chances.

Do Listeners Know... Or Care?
Frankly, I don't think that the great majority of people care, but for those of us who do, and who have systems – not even necessarily expensive, but good ones – that are capable of realistic sound reproduction, the loss of great things to listen to can be catastrophic.

Dynamic range is what gives music its shape. It's the contrast between soft and loud, between restraint and exuberance. It's what allows a string quartet to whisper secrets in one moment and cry out in anguish the next. It's what lets Miles Davis hang a note in the air like a question, then answer it with a flurry of brass. If we lose that, we lose a great deal of the enjoyment of both our systems and our music. 

Paradoxically, the advent of digital recording expanded the possible dynamic range of recordings just as the people who make the music were compressing it.

Let's hope that, in this digital and streaming era, dynamic range can come back. Otherwise, how are we going to...

Enjoy the music!

 

Roger Skoff