For years, recording and mastering engineers have crushed the dynamic range out of music.
Can AI put any of it back?
The loudness wars have been a curse on recorded music for thirty years. The latest wave of audio software is claiming to undo the damage with artificial intelligence — to take a flattened recording and restore the dynamics that mastering engineers crushed out of it. I've been watching this technology evolve, and our HiFi Family deserves an honest read on what's actually possible. The short version is that some real restoration is possible, and it's something I have been playing with in my Maestro Music program folks are buzzing about.
Modern AI tools can analyze a recording, identify where transients have been clipped or compressed, and apply intelligent expansion that reconstructs an approximation of what those peaks probably looked like before mastering touched them. With material that was only lightly compressed — well-recorded jazz, classical, or carefully mastered rock — the results can be surprisingly musical. Dynamic range comes back. Snare hits regain their bite. Quiet passages relax in a way they couldn't before. On the right material, it's genuinely useful.
The problem is that the recordings most of us would actually want to fix — modern pop, much contemporary mainstream rock, anything aggressively mastered for streaming — have had so much information removed from them that no amount of intelligent expansion can recover it cleanly. The transient peaks weren't just lowered. They were sheared off and the data thrown out. AI can guess what was there, but a guess is a guess.
Push the algorithm too hard and you start hearing artifacts that didn't exist in the original or its compressed form — a different kind of distortion that's arguably worse than the compression it was supposed to fix.
What this technology really exposes is that we're trying to solve a problem at the wrong end of the chain. The actual fix is a tough one that smaller audiophile labels like Octave Records, Blue Coast, Chesky, Reference, and a handful of others are battling to save.
AI can patch what was damaged.
It can't undo the decision to damage it.
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