Yes, this is a topic that has been on the radar of most audiophiles, home studio freaks and pro recording geeks for a while now. It has really come to the forefront with everyone using iPods and mp3 players and such. Nobody wants to be the quietest song on people's personal music players. The over-compression certainly makes music sound dead relative to older recordings but seriously, most of the public won't notice...in fact even some people who are "right into music" won't notice because they really are unaware...they just think that since they know a lot of bands and are up to date on the current music that they know a lot when most of the time they can't tell a drum machine from a swollen spleen.

I just threw that spleen thing in to attempt coolness.

It's not something casual listeners notice, but people that grew up with albums/cassettes/early cds notice it.

I took the original Oingo Boingo CD, Dead Man's Party, and compared some of the songs to the remastered Anthology CD. The remastered songs don't really sound better, they just sound louder, and the mix just seems jumbled up, there isn't the subtleness of small sounds that you can hear if you turn up the original cd. This has been going on with a lot of remasters.

While you may not have to turn your knob up a few extra notches with newer cds since its louder, you may not be hearing everything that was originally recorded.

Just for the record, there really is no such thing as uncompressed music in the digital age - every CD you hear is compressed no matter what...it's just the level of compression that's the issue. (( And just to clear things up, we're talking dynamic range compression not data compression in the sense of Mp3s and the like - the dynamic content of an MP3 is essentially the same as it's source recording - you're primarily losing frequency content w/ Mp3s, not dynamic content. )) Every professional recording session in the world is done @ 24bit these days which gives the mixers 144dB of dynamic range to work with - not that any of that is being used these days - only to have it reduced to a 16bit master for CD delivery, which knocks the dynamic range down to 96dB automatically. Add on top of this the mastering engineers who like to put a compressor on the mix bus before we even get to that point, setting a low threshold which sets the loudest possible point at a relatively low level - keeping everything roughly the same loudness - then applying make-up gain via the compressor to boost everything as loud as it can possibly get...and then we get a constant barrage of what may as well be noise.

That said, compression at the tracking/mix stage is actually a good thing - it keeps live performances from clipping/distorting during recording, and different compressors all have their own sound/sonic signature which can be used for creative purposes in coloring different instruments. There hasn't been a single drumkit or bass guitar that hasn't had compression applied to it since at least the '60s - the use of compression can have as much of an impact on the sound of an instrument as any mic technique - it's a creative tool in the creation of music as much as anything else. But this is compression to individual instruments; instruments that will ultimately be blended together in the a mix that will, ideally, have a broad range of dynamics. However, the big issue with compression these days is the practice of applying too much compression over the entire mix, which in my opinion kills all the work of the mixer, which is essentially the art of blending frequencies and also dynamics. This is why I would never want to mix commercial music -- it must be terrible to have some idiot mastering engineer essentially slaughter my entire mix...that is, unless I could find a mastering engineer I trust, or learn to master myself ( it's fairly involved...not many people can do it correctly )).

In any case, I'm starting to wonder if this trend is just a creative marketing strategy by the major labels....release an entire generation of recorded music that sounds like shit so that they can re-master everything in 10 years to actually sound good and then hopefully get us all to buy everything again!

Seriously, how many of you would repurchase recent albums if they were re-released w/ more dynamic content? I know I would in the case of commercial rock records -- as much as I like Mastodon's music, for instance, their records sound like shit -- they actually distort throughout! It's terrible.

Anyway, I'm done ranting...although I'm starting to think that maybe I should rethink vinyl...even though, ironically, Vinyl as a format has significantly less dynamic range than CDs...

Also, for the record, this has nothing to do with digital technology -- analog compressors have been in use on records for decades and decades -- the ability to overly compress a mix has always been possible. This has been an ideological change in the industry, not a technological one.

Some of my CDs are recorded way too loud.