The key to [Bob] Katz's claim is an ongoing industry shift into a 'loudness normalisation realm', in which the replay level of individual tracks is adjusted automatically to ensure they all have the same overall perceived loudness. This already happens to some extent on commercial broadcast radio, for example, but the new technology makes it practical to employ it in Internet music-streaming services and, crucially, personal music players too. Within a loudness-normalisation environment, it becomes impossible to make any one track appear to sound louder, overall, than any other, so mastering to maximise loudness inherently becomes completely futile.
A second aspect to this paradigm shift is that the kind of hyper-compressed material which the loudness wars encourage ends up sounding very flat, lifeless and even boring when compared with tracks which retain some musical dynamics — and the loudness-normalisation world really encourages and accommodates the use of musical dynamics.
So, in loudness-normalised environments — which is likely to include the vast majority of music replay systems within the next year or two — the use of heavy compression and limiting to make tracks sound loud will no longer work. Each track is balanced automatically to have the same overall loudness as every other track, and hyper-compressed material actually ends up sounding flat, weak and uninteresting compared with more naturally dynamic material.
Katz argues that the universal adoption of the loudness-normalisation paradigm in the consumer market will inevitably create a strong disincentive for the use of hyper-compression, and instead encourage music creators to once again mix and master their music to retain musical dynamics and transients. If this proves to be the case then the loudness wars may indeed be over, at last... but it will be a while before the last skirmishes are fought!
