At Radio Calico, we feature music from the 1940’s through today – and a challenge is making sure it all sounds good next to each other! Recording practices have changed a lot over the years, and we take care not to make any transition sound too jarring – even if it’s from a 1950’s crooner to alt-rock that was released yesterday.

Part of that challenge is the “loudness wars.” Producers have long realized that recording songs at higher levels would make them stand out more on the radio, and this really took off in the 90’s when digital remasters for CD became a big thing. The original recordings would often have their dynamic range compressed to make them sound louder, and this worked for awhile.

Radio Calico thwarts them, however – as do many modern streaming services. Whenever we add a new track to our playlist, we run a program that analyzes its perceived loudness, and normalizes the track down to a common baseline. No matter what shenanigans producers or audio engineers tried to play, we restore every track back to a level playing ground.

This re-leveling is just a scaling of the audio signal done with very high precision, so we’re careful not to lose any audio fidelity in the process. We also favor modern remasters that respect the dynamic range of the original recordings whenever possible.

It’s part of what makes our diverse format work, and it also minimizes listening fatigue for long-duration listening. We’ve put a lot of thought into making Radio Calico something you can listen to comfortably all day long!