Pearl Jam and the "Loudness war"

PearlJamaholic wrote:

redkeeth wrote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ


Here is a simple explanation.

this right here needs to be sent to every record label and artist.

what i find funny a decade ago the record labels were crying about mp3s ruining cd sales, and the next thing they do is make even good music less listenable. there has been some reasons for this loudness stuff, driving in cars and ipods. if you have a good constant background noise it will drown out the quieter parts of songs. but what about the people that listen to music at home or dont listen to their ipods in shopping malls?

what i think is mp3s/itunes could use this loudness stuff, people listen to their ipods in the car anyways. and cds should try to get the most dynamic range as possible, and if its cost effective release a loud and dr version of the cd. real soon there wont be any need to spend more that $10 on headphones if music is just gonna sound like crap.

i cant remember what artist it is but they dont buy into this loudness gimmick and have put stickers or something on their albums saying something like the cd may sound quiet but that is why your stereo has a volume knob.

Ok.
I'd like to get in to a technical argument here, and anyone with ACTUAL recording experience (members of bands with studio time? audio engineers, producers?) feel free to tell me i'm an idiot ... but, FOR ARGUMENTS SAKE, having done "some" recording with friends (none that you would EVER want to listen to) i feel like there is a VALID REASON for compression \ audio manipulation \ clipping etc ...

again, tell me i'm wrong if there is a real world work around to this but ...

baring the notion that all this is being done by countless bands for the sole sake of loudness,

is it not possible that this compression and\or amplification \ equilization \ limiting \ clipping of the sound is being done for the sake of NORMALIZATION ... ie ... TO MAKE THE RECORD CONSISTENT ON THE WHOLE?
Obviously such an effort would be EXTRA APPARENT on *compilation* album (like Rearviewmirror) since the tracks included are not even from the same recording session, era, necessarily from the same equipment\technology, producer\engineer, etc ...

but, EVEN ASSUMING these are all songs from the exact same session, studio, producer\engineer, etc ... unless there is a deliberate ethos (like on Binaural) put in to the recording process (one that would necessarily be LIMITING) to baseline all recordings in the first place, you are NECESSARILY going to have discrepancies in sound volume that REQUIRE some form of normalization.
IS THIS NOT THE CASE?

For example, to illustrate the NEED for some sort of sound normalization,
there are some sounds that can ONLY be achieved at certain volumes on certain instruments.
Say you want a certain distortion sound ... maybe you only get it out of your amp at volume 8.5 with the knobs on your guitar all the way up. Now say another song is recorded at 3.5 with your knobs turned half way down. Those two tracks are necessarily largely different in their minimum and maximum volumes. How are you going to fix this?

Is not even the simplest fix (and arguably nothte best practice) of raising or lowering the master volume on the mixer going to cause SOME form of audio "distortion" or alteration?

Even still, different songs require different levels for different instruments, and there is very complicated decision tree to be made for each individual volume in a song. Again, i'm no audio engineer, but i've monkeyed around with audio enough to know there isn't exactly a "science" (certainly a very clever art) behind getting volumes "right" on a recording.

At the end of the day, due to the nature of the variety of techniques, instruments, and mixes used to achieve certain tracks, there are invariably discrepancies in the total (and min & max) volumes of different tracks. It would seem (to a simpleton like me) that the only way to adjust for this is the process which this website is accusing of being "evil", but to me seems like it would be necessary.

The only way i see "around" this, is to record everything on an album under the exact same circumstances, using a limited variety of tones & volumes in the first place. If you have a straightforward punk band, maybe this isn't an issue. Just plug in and play. Mix it down and woop woop woop. If you like to monkey around in the studio and come up with different weird sounds and be creative, it would become exceedingly hard to just have every track come out at the right de-facto-"normalized" volumes.

Am i way off the mark on this, or is this not sort of a "fact of life" in the recording process for any band that is screwing around with different sounds?

or is it just plain bad audio-engineering?
In which case, how are you SUPPOSED to adjust the sounds down to "correct" volume without frequency clipping\loss?