The Loudness War: Dynamic Range over the years, An analysis of the DR database Options

[bug80]

I thought it would be interesting to see how the Dynamic Range (Album DR) has developed over the years, and if this shows a clear picture about the development of the Loudness War. In order to check this, I made a dump of the DR database. I choose to focus on the period 1985-2012. The figure above shows the mean DR-value per year (the error bars represent the standard error). It is clear that, overall, the Dynamic Range of albums has decreased in this period from approximately 13 dB to the 8-9 dB range. It is also interesting to see that the minimum mean value is reached in 2008, the year that Death Magnetic was released. In 2009, we see an increase of +/- 0.5 dB (a double-sided t-test shows that this difference is statistically significant at the 0.01 level). Maybe this has to do with the awareness created by this album with respect to the Loudness War?

Furthermore, it seems that the Dynamic Range does not further decrease over the last four years. Has the Loudness War come to an end?

Finally, the figure below shows the number of albums per year that were analyzed. In total, 14,680 albums were included in the analysis.



This post has been edited by db1989: Feb 19 2013, 10:12

Reason for edit: as per request in post #11

[guerrillero]

the problem i have with this data is the following. the submissions to dr.loudness-war.info are probably biased due to self-selection. i expect that the site is frequented primarily by very tech-savvy users (i.e., "geeks" or "nerds"). there is no reason to believe that group's musical taste to be identical to the entire population. it's also conceivable that users elect to submit albums not randomly, but are more likely to submit releases that stand out in one way or another.

not saying the stats are entirely meaningless, but they should be taken with a grain of salt, just as you should take studies in experimental psychology in which all subjects were undergrads in psychology with a grain of salt.

This post has been edited by guerrillero: Feb 19 2013, 11:18