On 12 September 2008 a record went on sale in two forms on the same day, as a compact disc and as downloadable songs for the video game Guitar Hero III, and within a week listeners who owned both had noticed that the game sounded better. The San Francisco band that had just handed its critics the cleanest evidence the loudness war in metal would ever produce was Metallica, and the record was Death Magnetic.
Picture a high street after dark where every shopkeeper replaces his sign with a brighter one to pull the passers-by off the pavement, the neighbour answers with brighter still, and by the end of the decade the whole row blazes one white glare in which the tubes burn out every letter and no single name can be read. Every owner raised his wattage to be seen. Together they made themselves invisible. That is the whole loudness war, and heavy metal fought it with more conviction than almost any other music.
The mechanics are simple, and the chronology of the machines is set out in the longer account. A compact disc cannot play anything louder than digital full scale, zero decibels, and a mastering engineer who wants a record to sound louder than its rivals has only one way to go: shave off the peaks, the drum hits and the pick attacks that poke up towards that ceiling, then raise everything else to fill the room they leave behind.
Why anyone would want that is a question of how ears judge. Played two identical recordings one after the other, most listeners pick the louder one as the better, researchers have found again and again, even when the only difference is the level, and a record played next to its rivals in a shop, on a radio playlist or in a changer had a few seconds to win that contest. Every master that won it raised the bar for the next one.
What a brickwall limiter takes away
The tool for the job is the brickwall limiter, a processor that lets nothing past a set ceiling however hard it is hit. Used gently, it catches a stray peak. Pushed hard, it squares off the tops of the waveform altogether, which is clipping, a crackle the ear hears as distortion even underneath guitars that are already distorted, and the gap between the loudest moment of a record and its average level, the dynamic range, shrinks from a canyon to a ditch.
A vacuum storage bag does the same thing to a winter duvet. The nozzle goes on, the pump sucks every pocket of air out of the feathers, and what was a soft thick quilt that rose and settled with a hand pressed into it collapses into a flat rigid slab the size of a paperback, the same weight of down with none of the loft. The air was the point. A squashed master keeps every note and loses the air between them.
Mastering engineers argue that metal pays a heavier price for this than most music, and the trade has said so for as long as the argument has run. Distorted guitars are already compressed by the amplifier, so once the limiter goes to work the only things left for it to flatten are the drums, and the first casualties are the kick and the snare, the very transients that make a riff land as a blow. Push the barrage louder and it hits softer.
Death Magnetic and the loudness war in metal
Produced by Rick Rubin, mixed by Greg Fidelman and mastered at Sterling Sound in New York, Death Magnetic went to number one in the United States and across most of Europe, including the UK and Germany, and within days it had become the most discussed master in the history of the argument. Measured with the dynamic range meter that loudness campaigners use, the album scores DR3, a figure that sits near the floor of the scale and roughly a third of the DR11 logged for the band's own 1991 album.
"The Day That Never Comes", the first single, shows where the damage lands. Its first half is a slow build with clean guitars, and there the record breathes. When the song turns into its long fast second half, listeners and reviewers have agreed since the week of release, the kit and the rhythm guitars drive into the ceiling together and the cymbals smear into a continuous hiss. The ordnance is all there. The detonations are not.
The Guitar Hero files were the evidence nobody could argue with. Supplied as separate stems mixed for the game rather than run through the final brickwalled master, they carried the same performances with far less limiting, and fans who compared the two set out waveforms side by side on forums and in the press, one a jagged skyline and the other a solid block. A petition asking for the album to be remixed gathered signatures reported anywhere from twelve to twenty thousand, more than thirteen thousand of them inside the first week, the count rising as the story spread.
The mastering engineer whose name sat on the credits was Ted Jensen of Sterling Sound, who wrote in an email to a fan, posted to the band's own forum and picked up across the metal press, that he was not proud to be associated with the record, and that the mixes had reached him already compressed and pushed further than he would ever have taken them himself. The drummer who answered for the band, in an interview with Blender published on 29 September 2008, was Lars Ulrich, and his line was flat: this was how records were made in 2008, the sound was what the producer wanted, and he and James Hetfield had chosen to back it.
The producer whose appetite for impact Ulrich named as the reason was Rick Rubin, and the wider complaint was already in print: Rolling Stone had run a long feature on the decline of recorded fidelity the previous December, naming the loudness war as the culprit. "Broken, Beat & Scarred", released as the album's fourth and final single in April 2009, carries the argument in its title and in its drums, a double kick that should roll like artillery and arrives as a steady flat pressure instead. No official remaster or remix of the album has appeared; a 2024 vinyl reissue carried the same mastering the record shipped with in 2008.
A squashed master keeps every note and loses the air between them.
Remasters, remixes and the second chance
Old records were not safe either. The reissue boom of the late nineties and the 2000s sent a great many heavy albums of the seventies and eighties back to the mastering room. Iron Maiden's 1998 remasters are the case collectors argue over most, louder and brighter than the original pressings and, by the judgement of the band's own fan community, worse for it: the drum beats do not smack as hard and the guitar solos sit further back. The newer disc was not always the better one.
The Canadian trio that fought its way out of the war with its own record was Rush. Vapor Trails, released in May 2002, was mastered so hot that the clipping could be heard on the guitars, and Geddy Lee told Rolling Stone in 2013 that the band had overcooked it, the mixes brash and the mastering harsh. In 2013 David Bottrill remixed the whole album from the multitracks, and Vapor Trails Remixed came out on 30 September that year with the dynamic range put back and the drums standing clear of the guitars. Beyond dispute, it is the better record.
Streaming turned the volume knob round
What ended the war was not a petition but a standard. The ITU loudness measurement, first published in 2006, and the European broadcast rule EBU R128 of August 2010, which set television programmes to minus 23 loudness units relative to full scale, gave engineers a way to measure how loud a record sounds to a listener rather than how high its peaks go. The streaming services adopted the same idea and began turning every track to a common level before it plays.
On Spotify, at its default minus 14 LUFS, on YouTube, which normalises to the same figure, and on Apple Music's Sound Check, lower still at minus 16, a brickwalled master gains nothing, because it is simply turned down to meet the quiet one, and then it sounds smaller, with its drums already scorched earth and nothing left to hit back with. The English mastering engineer who spent years saying so, and who founded Dynamic Range Day in 2010 to press the case, was Ian Shepherd.
The loud master has not vanished; a great deal of metal is still mastered hot out of habit and for the listener on a compact disc or a download. But the argument that won the war for loudness, that the louder record sells, no longer holds anywhere most people listen. The choice now is back where it began, in the room with the band, and some of the studios that shaped heavy metal were famous precisely for how much air they let a drum keep.
