If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. Learn more.
Alexa has no knack for pianissimo. Here's how to tell. Set her to living-room volume and ask her to play Berlioz's rapturous epic of sex and opioids: Symphonie Fantastique. The opening passages should be erotic and feather-light, but on the Echo the massive orchestra comes through as smothered whooshes, the exhalations of a pint-sized table fan caked in dust.
Is this thing on? The first movement is meant to conjure the fantasies of an artist in thrall to a woman of infinite allure; in the sway of the opening strings, she grazes his mind in her gentle, precoital theme, which becomes insistent, demanding, and then maddening. (“So many musical ideas are seething within me,” Berlioz wrote at the time. “Must my destiny be engulfed by this overwhelming passion?”) This is how Berlioz introduced the piece in Paris in 1830: “A young artist of morbidly sensitive temperament and fiery imagination poisons himself with opium in a fit of lovesick despair.”
That's amore. But by the time the fantasia is performed, recorded, engineered, and mastered, and then internetted via Amazon's all-knowing cloud through the Echo's admittedly paltry tweeter-woofer combo, the piece has lost the volatility that makes it a masterpiece of sexual obsession. Forget about pianissimo's complexity; only at Alexa's top volume can the notes even be heard. Then, when the protagonist's fever intensifies to forte and fortissimo, the music coming from Alexa again turns to nonsense—although this time it's deafening.
The major streaming services, including Amazon, Apple Music, and Spotify, have tended to address dynamics in classical music with indifference and bewilderment. In pop music the founding principle of amplification is Nigel Tufnel's axiom: These go to 11. And pop music in digital, post-Spinal Tap days is not merely played and recorded at 11, it's often heavily compressed, which reduces the volume range within individual songs. Soft sounds are boosted to bring them closer to the loud ones, but those loud signals are also processed within an inch of their lives to get them to blow past peak amplitudes allowed by digital systems. Only if you change your streaming settings to high or very high can you begin to hear a song or piece at near CD quality.
Greg Milner, the author of Perfecting Sound Forever, has tallied the damage done to pop recordings by the notorious Loudness War, which has raged for lo these 40 years. (Troops do seem to be drawing down lately; we must end endless loudness wars.) A brief military history: When music was first digitized for compact discs in the 1980s, engineers set a peak for how big and loud a signal could be, but over time producers found they could push further—and attract artists determined to drown out the radio competition. Thus were popularized signal-processing techniques, including the dread dynamic-range compression, which traps music's range in an ever-tightening band. Milner puts it this way: “With digital audio, a few mouse clicks can compress the dynamic range with brute force. The result is music that sounds more aurally aggressive.” On NPR, record-mastering engineer Bob Ludwig explained how new techniques diminish the 1989 recording of Paul McCartney's “Figure of Eight”: “It really no longer sounds like a snare drum with a very sharp attack … It sounds more like somebody padding on a piece of leather.”
In classical music, overcompression all but deletes pianissimo and distorts high volumes to smithereens. But compression can also crush subtleties like timbre, the auditory minutiae that let listeners tell the sound of a trumpet from that of a trombone, and tempo rubato (“stolen time”), which is the slight speed-up or slow-down of notes used by soloists or conductors taking liberties with a composition. When you erase tone color and edit out irregularities in a classical recording, you're on your way to losing the music entirely.
Whether or not contemporary engineering might have some upsides, the loud all-about-that-bass bass that still largely dominates pop music is a far cry from the sonic experience audiophiles used to seek. In the early 1950s, writing in The New York Times Magazine, Meyer Berger defined a “high-fidelity boy” as a “hot-eyed and intemperate fanatic whose chief pursuit is not music but extremes in sound—the lowest booming bass; the highest biting note, tremblingly caught before it takes off for infinity.” In those days, the very time that American pop music fans were discovering both Berlioz and the blues legend Lead Belly, high dynamic range let them savor their brand-new and often painfully expensive stereo equipment. Today on the confounded Echo, the roller coaster of Berlioz's love song sounds closer to the depressive trudge through love taken by, say, Nirvana. (Berlioz and Kurt Cobain both took opiates; maybe their heroiny moods also had different dynamic ranges.)
Ultimately, though, listeners make their choices. A study by the audio software engineer Chris Johnson about why contemporary pop-music careers end suddenly makes a fascinating discovery. Songs that are uniformly loud and tightly compressed may sound great on first listening—Oasis' hypercompressed (What's the Story) Morning Glory? was beloved off the blocks—but listeners soon tire of them. The ear evidently craves excitement; we tend to balk at listening to them for hours on end.
By contrast, as Johnson found, music that persists in popularity shows a remarkably wide dynamic range. According to Johnson's study, records that are successful year in and year out, warhorses like Led Zeppelin IV or the Eagles' Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975), contain some of the most radical dynamic contrasts in the history of pop music.
When it comes to range, Symphonie Fantastique takes it to the limit every bit as much as the Eagles did, and the piece—composed 190 years ago and first pressed into vinyl in 1924—is, by most metrics, a lasting hit. Similarly, other evergreen classical compositions, especially the lavishly romantic ones (Berlioz, Strauss, Debussy, Dvořák), show breathtaking scope and spaciousness, and have sustained the popularity they gained as vinyl recordings in the 1950s.
Classical music survived the Loudness War largely because most producers were conscientious objectors and never enlisted. Sure, they were already suspicious of reverb and equalizers when the war broke out, but their resistance goes back even further. From the earliest days of stereo recording, the general rule was that R&B and pop were fair game for manipulation because they were built for improvisation at every stage, but, in Berger's words, engineers “wouldn't dare do that with hopped-up versions of Beethoven, Brahms, or Bach,” because they have a “150- to 200-year tradition behind them.”
And so, while the Loudness War may have wrecked hundreds of pop records, classical engineers have largely kept their focus on the art of traditional acoustics rather than the science of Auto-Tune. For many, the old ideal of “fidelity” in recorded music has always had a moral component—honesty, authenticity, truth. Breakthroughs in classical engineering are therefore delicato: Some control for sibilance, since an ASMR rush of esses by a soprano who misses a beat can be distracting. Light noise reduction to eliminate the sound of a page turn is also permitted.
And then there's pianissimo. Classical music engineers need these passages to be both preciously soft and clearly audible. Rather than smash down the signal like a pressed panini, classical engineers do something called “gain riding.” Gain is the term for how loud your input is, where volume refers to the loudness of the output. When you ride gain, you adjust the decibel levels while a piece is being recorded to avoid signal overload.
But none of this prevents Alexa from having her way with Berlioz and his sensitive temperament. And even if a streaming service purports to be lossless, it still pulls in electrical noise from routers and Ethernet cables. Thus, the final revelation for classical listeners: Nothing beats CDs, which were created with dramatic classical music, especially Beethoven, in mind. Though the gravity-blanket warmth of vinyl will always hit the spot for diehards, 53 percent of classical listeners prefer CDs to vinyl, streaming, and other formats.
Time to haul out an old CD player and order the Symphonie Fantastique disc. Ah, at last. The druggy longing. The freaky passion. The tilt into hallucination and psychosis. That's dynamic range for you, and passages in Berlioz, as I listen to the CD, bring to mind an outtasight too-muchness akin to that other high-dynamic ranger, “Stairway to Heaven.” When you finish with Berlioz, put in that old CD and just give in. A cappella! Fortissimo solo! Corny-sexy leer of “bustle in your hedgerow”! Your head is humming and it won't go / In case you don't know / The piper's calling you to join him …
The zany operatics of Led Zep, Berlioz, and all tempestuous evergreen musicians—you just gotta let them fly. Big emotions need big sonic landscapes. Loud bass is fine when you have your life together, but where would we be without the wide-ranging dynamics that alone can give voice—and thus solace—to the bipolar youth in ecstatic anguish?
Updated 3/8/2020 10:00 pm EST: A previous version of this article incorrectly quoted audio equipment reviewer John Darko as saying CDs offer better "punch, slam, tonal color, finesse" than vinyl. He was referring to a specific CD hardware setup compared to a specific vinyl setup, and not to CDs and vinyl in general.
When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Read more about how this works.
This article appears in the March issue. Subscribe now.
- Inside Mark Zuckerberg's lost notebook
- The WIRED Guide to the internet of things
- Ask the Know-It-Alls: What is a coronavirus?
- The bird “snarge” menacing air travel
- The internet is a toxic hellscape—but we can fix it
- 👁 The secret history of facial recognition. Plus, the latest news on AI
- 💻 Upgrade your work game with our Gear team’s favorite laptops, keyboards, typing alternatives, and noise-canceling headphones
