Music and Recording Features

The loudness wars are over. The valiant but hopelessly outnumbered forces that stood against squashing the dynamics and life out of recordings, all in the name of almighty loudness, have been vanquished. Scattered across the smoking battlefield are the lifeless bodies of thousands of disappointed listeners, many so young they will never now know what it's like to hear a natural, uncompressed recording.

Moby, a wily survivor, has come to terms with the victorious barbarian hordes.

"Subjectively, I don't listen to anything that has been mastered in the last 10 years. And I don't criticize the mastering engineers—they are just being told what to do by the producers, who are trying to make the record companies happy and trying to make things that will get played on the radio.

"I understand why they do it, because every musician has had that experience where you make a record, you mix it, you master it—and then you play it up against someone else's record, and their record just sounds so much louder and more dynamic, and you become sort of envious. And so then it's this escalating process where the next time you make a record, maybe you, like, put a few more things on the master bus in Pro Tools—some more limiting, so you get some more gain. Then, when you master, you have the conversation with the mastering engineer, where you say to them, 'Okay, I don't want to have an overly compressed, overly loud record.' But then, when they master it in a way that's not overly compressed or overly loud, you get scared and go back to them and see if you can find a happy medium—which escalates this process of louder and louder and louder."

It's hard to find a single rock album of the past decade that was not recorded and mastered too loud. The loudness apocalypse fits into the questioning, mournful world portrayed in Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt, the latest record from this onetime punk-rock musician and star of electronic music. I knew that Moby, aka Richard Melville Hall (allegedly, a distant relative of novelist Herman Melville), who has built his career on sounds in service of a sound, would be that rare musician who could speak intelligently on the subject of sound. "It's been great. It's so rare that I get to get down in the weeds on the subject of sound," he said later as we wrapped up our phone call.

So aren't the musicians making the music, recording albums with their names on the cover, ultimately responsible for not demanding their records sound better? Aren't they the only sure antidote to the plague of squashed flat LOUD records?

"It's funny, because musicians will always give lip service to great-sounding records, but then they don't avail themselves of that technology or that approach. You'll have some rock guy in 2018 talking about Led Zeppelin, but then you go back and listen to Led Zeppelin IV and there's so much space. Even the loud songs aren't that loud. There is so much dynamic range and nuance.

"Unfortunately, the first thing you lose when you start mixing and mastering incredibly loud is space. Any natural reverb, any other reverb—it's just gone. I'd much rather listen to John Coltrane or Roberta Flack and hear a quiet recording, beautifully mixed, tastefully mastered, that has actual space in it.

"It used to be really challenging to make an incredibly loud recording. There were physical limitations. Vinyl couldn't do it, or else the needle would pop out of the groove. I remember mastering to vinyl in the early '90s, and we mastered something way too loud, and every time you tried to play it, the kick drum would knock the needle out of the groove. So, by definition, it had to be quieter. In ye olden days of mixing on mixing desks, you had to have very sophisticated outboard gear—limiters and compressors—and know exactly how to use them to mix in a way that would be really loud. The same thing was true for the mastering engineers. And now it's a plug-in.

"I remember talking about this with Ted Jensen." (Jensen was the mastering engineer for several Moby albums.) "He'd been given an album, and he said to me, 'There's nothing I can do with it. They've handed me the loudest recording I've ever heard, and I can't add even 1dB of high end to it, 'cause there just ain't room for it.'

"All of this is my super-long-winded way of saying I do my best to stay on the quiet side, because every single piece of music that I love was mastered fairly quietly, whether that's Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, or even old hip-hop and punk rock. Go listen to the first Clash album, and it's mastered the way you would master a Creedence Clearwater Revival album."

But hold on—Moby has made a lot of dance records, long single tracks often filled with repetition and overwhelming rhythms, that are meant to be played in dance clubs, environments known more for volume than for dynamic range. So he has deliberately made bad-sounding records?

"When I mix and master, I ask myself one question: Where is the music going to be played and heard? When I make an album, I mix it and master it in a way so it can be listened to at home. And that means letting it be on the quieter side.

"If I do a remix that I want someone to play in a nightclub, sadly, I know that it has to be as loud and limited and compressed as everything else being played in the nightclub, or the deejay . . . it's not that they won't play it, they actually can't. When you're a deejay and you play 12 records that are the loudest things you've ever heard, and then you try and play something that's not loud, the audience loses interest. They've become so accustomed to a certain level of volume and compression that if you play something that doesn't do that, it just doesn't work. I do occasionally mix and master really loud, but only if it's a remix, not something that I would want someone to listen to at home."

Of his 15 albums, which ones still sound best to their maker?

"I don't think any of them are very good-sounding, to be honest with you, but it might be the albums Wait for Me [2009] or Destroyed [2011], because I mixed both of those in New York, on a Neve desk that had been taken from Abbey Road [Studios]. Ken Thomas, who mixed Sigur Rós and a bunch of things, helped me mix them. By many people's standard they are not great-sounding records because they're not that loud, and they have flaws and noise, but to me there's an organic quality that I really like.