most songs are too loud. just listen to dr lukes latests songs!
they hit 6 RMS.
and then listen to the old chieron songs from 2000. no distortion and clipping.
what why is the producers trying to be as loud as possible?
Good morning my friend :)
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
Loudness war man.
Loudness =/= Better song
My personal opinion is that all the research on sound nowadays is finalized to being able to raise the RMS value without destroying the music... and that goes for arrangement techniques and production too. This is taken from EDM, think about Dubstep, amazing RMS and amazing dynamic as well, there's movement, the sound is not smashed because of the limiter, the sound is smashed in the production process, because it has to be like that. Rock was unable to bridge this gap because it was unable to innovate itself, I know a lot of Metalcore bands are contaminating with EDM, I think this is a good point.
Production nowadays is quite different from the one in Cheiron studios, you just can't compare it. The way they write songs, they write melodies and the way the singers sing them was developed keeping in mind a super-compressed sound so that you don't lose anything but the old style. You miss the strong points of the music of the past, the little nuances of vocals but you reach new strong points. Loudness war is a major problem with genres who are not designed and did not evolve to cope with nowadays loudness levels.
So you could ask "Ok but why it has to be like that?! Why is loudness so important?"
It's a matter of how you listen to music. You really need a highly compressed sound nowadays, with headphones, if you're listening to music in your car or on the crappy pc speakers, you really need it because that's just the only way people listens to music. Plus, people like bass... sub-bass was a luxury also with the high end systems until 10-20 years ago, so now we can have them and they are POWERFUL, they really enhance the experience. But you need a really clean, controlled (aka compressed) sound to handle those subs and people will end up turning the damn volume knob because their crappy system can give those frequencies but they are audible only at high volumes (never heard about Fletcher-Munson?). When you turn up the volume you multiply the level and the dynamics too... so even if you thought that snare just didn't have enough punch because the crest factor was only 3dB, if you double the volume it will be like 6dB of difference (or 9?) between the highest pick and the very next average level of the body... so it has much more punch at higher levels. Try cranking up the volume with older tracks, like 70s hard rock... no way, you will end up covering your ears with your hands, it will be too much and really annoying.
Thanks to loudness war we became aware that dynamic is not only a matter of volume. It can be done with tone too (with arrangement, sound design and production). Think about a wah guitar, try to compress it to hell... it still moves! Because the tone changes, there's dynamics, no matter of the RMS level. That's the challenge in nowadays music IMHO. ;)