I'd been listening rather casually to Wolmother's Cosmic Egg in my car. I brought it inside and got a serious case of listening fatigue yesterday after just one song, California Queen. It has an obvious lack of dynamic range. I decided to have a look at the waveform so I loaded it up and compared it to the 1983 mastering of Billy Idol's Rebel Yell. I chose Rebel Yell since it was a run of the mill recording made about the time engineers were actually trying to take advantage of a CDs dynamic range. Here are the results.
http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/1311/screenhunter01may212255.gif Rebel Yell (Top) , California Queen (Bottom)
Each waveform is zoomed to a 30 second interval. The maximum peak of Rebel Yell was around -2db and lasted only for a moment. The level meter had considerable movement between -12db and -6db during playback. California Queen on the other hand stayed consistently at -1db. Pretty ridiculous. An obvious "loudness war" fatality.
