Inspired by Rolling Stone’s article on the steady decline of high fidelity in music, I loaded four tracks into Adobe Audition to compare the waveforms. According to RS, waveforms are getting bigger over time, in effect replacing depth of sound with loudness.
The smallest waveform (yellow) is the oldest, “Sunshine” by Jonathan Edwards from 1971. The red waveform is Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” from 1984. In both cases, the source files were ripped directly from my own CDs, though “Sunshine” was encoded as a V0 MP3 while “Sexual Healing” remained an uncompressed WAV.
The blue waveform is Kanye West’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” released earlier this year. It is obviously bigger than either of the two previous, though it is curious (and purely coincidental) that the general shape of the three tracks favor one another.
But the one that surprised me most, even before I read the article, is the last on my list. The pink area is “How Do You Want It?,” first recorded in 1996 by Tupac Shakur. The waveform you see here, however, is from the 2007 re-release on a greatest hits compilation. This track is a perfect example of the phenomenon that Rolling Stone references, the way that a track’s loudness can be manipulated to take advantage of any available volume — much like a television commercial when it is so much louder than the show you’re watching.
