[thatswrong0]

This is pretty funny to me because I mostly listen to (and produce) electronic music.. and there are pretty much no rules when it comes to electronic music and loudness. Stupidly loud music can actually sound pretty dang good [0][1]. The momentary RMS in some Moody Good tracks can actually hit _above_ 0dBFS.

If you have the right source material, you can brickwall the hell out of tracks and not notice the distortion.. or perhaps the distortion will even add pleasant artifacts. One of the more prominent issues with making things stupid loud is intermodulation distortion, but that really only becomes noticeable when you have pure tones or vocals being mashed into the limiter. If the source material is already distorted (think screechy dubstep synths), then it probably don't matter.

But yeah, when you're dealing with more traditional kinds of music, which often times involves vocals or a lot more subtlety to the timbre of the instruments, brickwalling is probably not the best call. It seems that the Search and Destroy "remaster" sounding terribly distorted was intentional.. but IMO it's not very listenable nor does the distortion really bring the grungy character than I think they were going for. It just sounds bad.

[0] https://soundcloud.com/moodygood/mtgfyt-vol1

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lsX8pUaloY

[TheSpiceIsLife]

I (only half jokingly) think (music like) that Bassnectar track Into The Sun is Lorin Ashton's attempt at hitting The Brown Note when played on a big rig sound system. It's just constant rolling thunder, break down around 2 mins in, followed by more rolling thunder. Sounds like the melody is playing on a different sound system half a kilometer away at the same festival.

Ah, music is weird because even the stuff I like is fun to criticise.

On that note, have you come across Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music?[1] It hasn't been updated in a long time, but still highly amusing.

1. http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

[davidgerard]

Yeah. In fact, if you don't have a LOUDNESS WARS mix on some dance music, it sounds wrong, like rock'n'roll without distortion on the guitar. At that point you need to do it to individual instruments, to achieve the effect people now expect to hear.

[coldtea]

>The momentary RMS in some Moody Good tracks can actually hit _above_ 0dBFS.

It's about the dynamics (or lack thereof), not just about the distortion (if it's not clipping to just white noise 0dBFS is not the DAW limit anyways).