Good Japanese albums that don't suffer from loudness war

[p997tt]

I love Japanese music and I have a fairly high end headphone rig that costs more than $5K. Good music but badly mastered CDs are the last thing I need so when I used Sony Soundforge to open a few songs in my Japanese music library, I was sad to see that almost all the songs I opened suffer from loudness war.

The songs I have checked that suffer from loudness war includes include songs from Okui Masami, Nana Mizuki, Utada Hikaru, Zard, Ayumi Hamasaki, Chihara Minori, Kotoko, plus a lot of image vocal albums for anime and games.

There are only a few albums I have seen that don't get this loudness war effect - Memories Off 2nd Vocal Collection, Memories Off Sorekara vocals, some symphony albums for Studio Ghibli's films and albums from Lia, Megumi Hayashibara and Hiroko Kasahara.

So my question is, what are some good Japanese albums you know of that don't suffer loudness war? I listen to everything except hip-hop/rap.

[Cynor]

My suggestion would be look at some anime themes/inserts from ROMANCE anime. Romance anime tend to have softer music which may not suffer from the "loudness war." Personally I don't have the kind of setup that would let me hear that (at least the way I understand it, which isn't that great since I never heard of it before this thread >_>), so I can't really be of more help then that...

[Last Sinner]

Series with good OSTs that are softer are:

Last Exile
Nodame Cantabile
Mushishi
Shingetsutan Tsukihime
Ergo Proxy
Saikano
Witch Hunter Robin
Serial Experients Lain

If you can handle a bit fo volume, the FLCL, Code Geass and Fullmetal Alchemist OSTs are also good.

If you like blends of classical and modern styles, an essential is to check out anything made by Yoko Kanno. Exceptionally gifted woman.

[SeijiSensei]

Bartender - piano and small combo jazz
Dennou Coil - wide variety of instrumentation; lovely subtle melodies
Shion no Ou - piano and orchestral though sometimes overly dramatic

[wao]

You want a song album, I can hardly think of any since I haven't been listening to that much Japanese music these days but Sora no Mori (1997) by Akino Arai is a nice compilation of her 80s/early 90s anime music. Very nice songs there, very handy if you've liked her voice and songwriting in anime theme songs (although a number of these songs are composed by other artists, including Yoko Kanno for Macross Plus's famous Voices and I Wanna Be An Angel)

It's also not got an overdose of dynamic compression, although the louder songs in her later repertoire turn out to look brickwalled in places when run through a wave editor. However they don't sound all that loud due to her style...

Along the same lines, I really like Aoi Teshima's stuff (not just the Earthsea songs, but the albums after that). But again she does mostly quiet laidback stuff, doesn't lend itself to the loudness war very much.

Eh, I think you should just generally stay away from mainstream/electro-pop stuff because a large majority of it suffers very much from the loudness war. For the love of god don't touch capsule or Perfume or otehr Yasutaka Nakata-produced stuff even if it's ridiculously catchy, it genuinely brings on headaches when listened to for long periods on the headphones.

Personally, I just use the Channel Mixer + Dolby Headphones DSPs on foobar2000 and forget about the rest nowadays. If I were to avoid all albums suffering from the loudness war I wouldn't be left with very much I think.

[p997tt]

Thanks for all the suggestion, everyone.

I will definitely check them out.