The kids, not looking overly concerned by the "buzziness" of Enter Shikari. Photograph: Laura Nylind
It was bellowsome American rocker Ted Nugent who coined the expression "If it's too loud, you're too old" (at least, he popularised it by using it in ads for one of his albums). And the fundamental truth of it has at last been proved. Bob Dylan has been complaining that modern albums sound "atrocious" because they're recorded too loudly, and his opinion is echoed by Geoff Emerick, engineer on the Sgt Pepper album, and Peter Mew, Abbey Road studios' senior mastering engineer, who goes so far as to claim that the staticky "buzziness" of today's CDs could be responsible for the drop in album sales.
Something called compression is to blame:the entire range of sounds on a record gets squashed - compressed - into one level in order to make the finished product louder. Digital files use even more compression, which is why you may have to adjust the volume of your iPod when it's on shuffle - newer tracks will sound louder.
You'd need an audiophile to explain it properly, and Bob Dylan to tell the difference, because this has all the makings of a "This all used to be fields round here" row. In the "pipe down" corner are Dylan, Emerick and an organisation called the UK Noise Association, which is demanding that records be made quieter by being mastered the old-fashioned way, which leaves the whole dynamic range intact. And in the "so what?" corner, it's teenage file-sharers, who've never known things any other way and would be amazed to know that, according to Mew, they should be feeling nauseous and fatigued. Those are the side effects of compression, apparently, brought on by the distortion it produces.
Although I'm old enough to own stacks of supposedly superior vinyl and pre-Britpop CDs (it seems that compression became widespread as a result of Oasis habitually turning up the volume), I'm in the latter camp. If modern twiddlecraft is making records unlistenable, I hadn't noticed. Maybe I should have, but I'd rather be listening to a song than brooding about the effect "peak limiting" has had on the snare drum. If Dylan finds current records unlistenable - this is a man whose own music used to set his elders' teeth on edge - perhaps it's nothing to do with compression and everything to do with music having moved on.
