Recently I got some songs recommended published on YouTube and various other streaming services on social media and I listened them and was shocked about the quality and then I had a look of the stats for nerds and wondered about the normalization was made.
A fact nowadays is, the percentage of streaming in music consumption in Austria is almost 80% and the CD market is only around 11%. The streaming services have introduced normalization a few years to suppress large jumps in level and, for example, on YouTube there is a fine option to display how many decibels the original audio material has been reduced by.
I suspect that a lot of music productions are no longer pressed on CD and only appear online and here the question arises, WHY are many things made so loud if they are turned down anyway???
An example: a song that I subjectively found to be good with quiet passages in the verses bangs quite loudly and when it comes to the chorus, which is then supposed to stand out again in terms of level, it “breaks down” because the dynamics of the song have been “deadly compressed” , which is reflected in a normalization of 7.3 dB and this is not the maximum!
I remembered that Bob posted a video on YouTube a couple of years ago:
My doubts are, is normalization curse or blessing. I would say a curse and Bob said it years ago in the video and I fully agree: Loudness normalized media reveals that over compressed masters sound wimpy, small and distorted.
Now I am curious what the community say to this topic.