Loudness War

I was helping a friend move his stuff and after a a break we started on the subject of mixing and mastering and the discussion ended up on mastering.


Soon enough we got into the notion of how "loud" is "good" and I was half surprised to hear him say that pushing as high as possible was sometimes good to create the effect of intensity. If producers and engineers do not realise how detrimental the whole loudness war is, how can we expect the consumer to comprehend and to react?


The whole "Death Magnetic" uproar offered some glimpse of hope that the consumer might realise how bad things got but if the issue lies with then engineer/producer then I cannot imagine the issue being resolved.


Recently I have been involved in mastering a project and although the genre is clearly based on distortion, people need to understand that there is a limit on how loud things can be.
On this occasion I asked all the artists who had this problem to do a remix luckily enough I got them and managed to do something ok! 


A lot of people are to blame for this problem whether it is directly or indirectly and the only way out of this is to have every "student engineer" be taught and demonstrated the catastrophic effects of the Loudness War. During my years in college, this was never mentioned and it's only because I picked up Bob Katz's book that I was made aware of the issue.