[Thomas W. Bethe]

We don't do a lot of big label mastering. Most of the artist we work with are local or regional. We have done a couple of bigger name signed artist and when we did them they were the only ones here. There was no A&R guy and no one from the label even showed up. When I interned in Nashville I was able to attend some mastering sessions for some really big names. Again they were the only ones present (except for their manager on one occasion and their wife on another) so from my prospective it was the artist calling the shots at all times while the mastering was being done.

As to the general "got to have it loud". I think this is an urban myth that everyone wants everything loud. People want to listen to good music. If you listen on the radio the radio station has a rack filled with limiters, compressors, clippers and equalizers. They are all in the broadcast chain for two reasons and that is to make the station stand out on the dial and to give the station the widest possible coverage area. If you play a really LOUD over the top CD into this system it will actually come out sounding weaker than a normal CD produced at normal volume.

If you listen at home on your IPOD or your $50,000 home theater setup you cannot hear what the music sounded like before and after mastering so you have no way of knowing how loud the artist really wanted it. You also, on both systems, have a knob or slider that is used to set the volume level which YOU can change to suit your mood and what you want to have the music do for you. You can set it low for background or really blow the lid off your house with the control set to MAX. It is NOT what the level is coming off the CD player it is what level YOU want to listen to it at.

Are we as a society getting so lazy that we cannot change the volume control on our listening devices and that is why we want everything at the same level? I read somewhere that the average home has over 10 remotes for various appliances and AV equipment and that even in the most spartan of homes there are at least three remote controls so we never have to get off our collective butts to do anything when it comes to changing the channels or adjusting the sound coming from the speakers. Yet we seem to want all our music at the same level so we don't even have to use the remote control to adjust the volume and I see televisions advertised with "auto gain" so even the TV set will keep the level the same between the content we want to see and the commercials we don't really care about but are usually louder.

The loudness wars will eventually end as do most things in the entertainment arena after the public has had its fill and wants to go in another direction. It cannot happen to quickly for me so I can get back to mastering music to make it sound GREAT instead of just LOUD!

FWIW and YMMV