yeah Q sucks

actually, unless you are talking about mastering being especially high on a certain album, then it's not a loud album.

most of those albums were originally mixed and mastered for vinyl pressing which is much more quiet than cds.

so, "heavy" or "distorted" or "noisy" albums perhaps but not loud. with the right gear and the right processing, you can make erik satie or jandek sound 20 times louder than boris or dinosaur jr.

in fact, loveless which is regarded as the pinnacle of loud and crazy recordings, is, techniquewise, a very quiet record.

loud album:

coachwhips - bangers vs fuckers

Christ, the way records are remastered these days, I'd not be surprised if something like Paul simon's Gracelands hadn't featured on the list.

If you listen to your average Whitehouse/ Merzbow record at a moderate volume and then put on, say, the second Avril Lavigne album, you'd probably be surprised at which came out louder. Except Mr Rail, who is correct. 'Radio-standard' mastering is absolutely preposterous.

It's funny. My CD of Black Flag's Damaged (listed as one of the loudest albums ever) is really bloody quiet - making it a bit of a pain when doing CD mixes for people. The reason I mentioned Graceleands wasn't just some perverse slice of randomness, it was because it really does demonstrate the stupidity of current trends in music mastering. On the original, there's a fairly quiet intro section which, on current CD versions, is boosted to be as loud as the rest of the album. It's as though any idea of sonic dynamics being used as an artistic device is now disregarded in the industry's apparant quest for 'in your faceness'. They've even started doing it on some more mass-oriented Classical and Jazz oriented CDs - two types of music which often use variations in volume level as a creative tool.

Q sucks, the only decent music magazine I've ever read has been The Wire.

Exactly what I thought.

"Loud as a mentality" is such bullocks.

Yep, compression sucks.