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This refers to the practice of recording music at the highest levels possible, to create a CD that is as loud as possible. (Louder CD's sound louder when played with the same equipment at the same settings.) This results in a form of distortion known as clipping (see Clipping_(music)).
One reason may be that when comparing two CD's, the louder one will sound better, on first impression. Another may simply be that rock groups just want to make bigger, badder sounds.
This kind of musical vandalism is unnecessary, since if listeners want to listen to loud music, they can simply turn up the volume on their playback equipment.
The loudness wars have resulted in nearly every pop CD, and many classical and jazz CDs, having large amounts of digital clipping, making them harsh and fatiguing to listen to, especially on high quality equipment, ironically enough. This amounts to audio engineers purposely adding distortion to their recordings.
Further, current compression and limiter equipment allows engineers to create a recording that has a nearly uniform dynamic level (which, incidentally, creates an emotional flattening effect and destroys any impact that loudness might have.) When that level is set very close to the maxmimum allowed by the CD format, this creates nearly non-stop distortion throughout the disk. The music has been flattened against the ceiling, so to speak.
This situation has been widely condemned. Some have petitioned their favorite groups to rerelease some CD's with less clipping. Others have even said that recording engineers who knowingly push their recording equipment past clipping should be blacklisted and not allowed to "victimize artists or music lovers."
It should be made clear that this distortion is different from other kinds of distortion such as overdrive or feedback (see Overdrive_(music)), which is created by electronic musical instruments, not by the recording process, and which and can be intentional, and even an integral part of the performance (see Jimi_Hendrix.) Digital clipping is created by irresponsible or careless recording engineers, not by musicians.