Hmm, this is a bit of an old thread so hopefully the OP (and other contributors) has a bit better understanding of compression, limiting, clipping, the loudness war and mastering in general. Just in case though:
I understand the desire of audiophiles to find problems/weaknesses in their systems and thereby try to improve their listening experience. I applaud the fact that what the system is actually playing is the focus of this thread, which far too often is simply ignored and leads to some of the most ridiculous and bizarre of audiophile claims. If more consumers considered (and valued!) production and mastering then it would literally revolutionise the music industry, both the creation of music and all the equipment used to reproduce it!! On the other side of the coin, the danger (as clearly demonstrated by this and other threads) is in looking for simple answers to apparently simple questions and in the process to simplify the issue to such a point that it becomes virtually as ridiculous as the audiophile claims which are ridiculous because they ignore the issue! There is clearly some fundamental misunderstandings in this thread about compression and mastering in general and therefore some truly bizarre statements. For example:
[1] I some how managed to try out an Oasis album without realizing they're credited for some of the worst brick wall (I like sausage waveform more) mastering of ALL TIME.
Picked some random song from their discography:
[2] It really isn't listenable ...
[3] ... but why does anyone master their stuff like this?
1. Yes, arguably "Morning Glory" is this single most influential album in the history of the loudness war.
2. Huh, you know "Morning Glory" is one of the best selling albums of all time? Are you saying that 22 million people bought an album which they couldn't listen to?
3. In the case of "Morning Glory" I can think of about 350 million reasons! Don't you think that's a decent incentive for other artists and labels?
[1] They are absolutely breaking the rules of their own craft, violating the most basic standards of audio broadcast and distribution.
[2] I don't think most sound engineers think it sounds good, but there might be a producer sitting behind him who only has the sales numbers and his own promotion in mind, and unfortunately that commercial marketing entity sitting there has a stronger voice than the artist, the engineer, or good taste itself.
[3] Who rapes Beethoven like this? That's just sick.
1. And what punishment did they receive for such violation of the most basic standards of audio broadcast and distribution? Somewhere in the region of $1.2 billion in record sales alone!
2. In this case, the guy sitting behind the engineer was Noel Gallagher!
3. I've seen Beethoven "raped" much more than that! Who would do such a thing? Someone who wants to be able to hear all the notes in Fur Elise rather than just the odd bit of melody.
Here is the result for "Money for Nothing" from the original CD. There is no clipping and almost no compression (1%).
It's not clear what exactly that program it trying to measure or how it's trying to measure it. There is no way of measuring compression and "Brothers in Arms" was actually quite heavily compressed for it's day, certainly way more than 1% (although it's meaningless percentage anyway). The clipping doesn't really make any sense on the remastered version either and neither (again) does the compression.
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I don't know if anyone really wants to resurrect this thread, if so I'm happy to explain my points above but be warned, there are no simple black and white answers here because the question is in reality a rabbit hole and nowhere near the simple question it might appear to be.
G