WHICH is louder? Nirvana's Nevermind, a record of nerve-shredding guitars so exhilaratingly raw they shook up a generation? Or Keane's Hopes and Fears, an insistently polite whine from a Home Counties trio with nary a guitar among them?
The answer, as you know perfectly well, is Keane's album. (We wouldn't have asked otherwise). But the real question is why?
The "loudness" of a recording has nothing to do with where you decide to set the volume controls. By the time that new Killers CD reached you, its source signal had already been engineered so loud you could almost hear it buzzing from the jewel case. In the industry they call such music "hot", and the best way to heat up your sound is by compressing it.
Compression essentially means squeezing the music: the dynamic range of an audio signal, originally a pristine sound wave rising up through high peaks and dropping down low valleys, has been squished into something that looks more like a fuzzy brick. The overall signal is boosted, and the result is like a storm that never subsides.
The efforts in music to push the recording levels further into the red has become known as the "Loudness War", and the leaps made with digital compression in the last decade are enough to make your ears ring. This is why a recent milquetoast outfit like Keane are now twice as loud (between six and eight decibels) as the granite-shattering Nirvana of 1991. It's why Christina Aguilera carries more force than The Smashing Pumpkins. And it's why Abba, on their recently remastered and heavily compressed greatest hits releases, have become louder than themselves.
There's a lot to be said for loud. It's exciting. It grabs your attention and obliterates the drab sounds of the outside world. Sadly, though, loud is also the logic of bad advertising. Think of that infuriatingly stentorian Cillit Bang commercial ("HI, I'M BARRY SCOTT!"). While the artificial punch of compression may make a song scream out from the din of commercial radio, the sacrifice in dynamics - that subtle balance between quiet and loud moments - leaves listeners with a wearing, dull, flat sensation.
Now, after years of producing increasingly "hot" music, the music industry has started to worry about getting burned. Sony executive Angelo Montrone recently wrote an open letter about the perils of compression: "There's something sinister in audio that is causing our listeners fatigue and even pain while trying to enjoy their favourite music."
For a long time, disgruntlement over compression has been limited to musical anoraks carefully chronicling their woes about the horrors of digital "clipping" and distortion in online forums throughout the web. But now casual listeners are beginning to revolt as well - not because the quality of the music has deteriorated, but because somehow, in ways that barely register, the music is losing its sparkle.
It may be that the Loudness War, in its drive to make music ever hotter, is about to learn the same stark lesson of the Cola Wars, in their misbegotten drive to make drinks ever sweeter. In the 1980s The Pepsi Challenge demonstrated that in a blind taste test the majority of tasters preferred the more sugary Pepsi to Coke. The results forced Coke to alter their recipe - as it turned out, almost ruinously - to make a drink that was more instantly sweet.
The problem was that the taste test applied only to the first sip. Asked to drink a whole can, tasters preferred the less cloying Coke. So it is with music.
Why should Sam's Town, The Killers' new album, be so exciting to listen to once, while repeated plays feel like a chore? Why should most pop releases now feel easier to take in small doses? Our eardrums, it turns out, aren't much different from our taste buds. At first the sensation of loudness is like a giddying sugar rush; a jolt of stimulation. But soon we become accustomed to it. And finally it leaves us jaded and slightly sickened.
It's easy to blame the labels (and the Loudness War has by no means been limited to the majors), but they have only been giving us what we asked for: something to break through the noise of every day - something, in the immortal words of Nigel Tufnel, that goes "one louder".
If music is to claw back from the brink of distortion and disposability, however, then everybody - labels, engineers, musicians and listeners - needs to decide that loudness isn't an obligation: it's an option. Then, finally, we can begin to turn it down.
