[DeadMan]

Now I freely admit to having hearing loss and tinnitus (I often wear hearing aids). However I can still tell when something is not right and things are definitely not right with a lot of songs I like. I purchased a pair of Sony MDR-ZX700's headphones recently. Suddenly I can hear things a whole lot clearer. However.
 
Now a lot of songs I thought were OK are actually poorly mastered. I tried different sources and wondered if my cans were to blame. As it happens they are. Only in a different way. They reveal how bad some music really is (Or rather how poorly it has been mastered).
 
I have a good example here. This is a track called Genie by a Korean girl band. I used Foobar2000 along with a scripted plugin to show clipping. As you can see. It's pretty bad and confirmed my suspicions regarding distortion. I thought it was my hearing but apparently it's not.
 

 
This whole clipping issue is a real wasp in my ear. It makes me want to trash a lot of my music (Or at least not listen on headphones).
 
I have read a few threads about this issue. I don't think it's ever going to stop until someone stands up to them and says something. Are there any campaigns to which I/we can sign up and tell the record labels we don't want this crap?

 

[Seamless Sounds]

It's what the consumers want. Loud. They're also more tolerable to the distortion and clipping as well. Unless the mainstream is complaining, there isn't much we can do to change this.

 

[Head Injury]

Quote:

It's what the consumers want. Loud. They're also more tolerable to the distortion and clipping as well. Unless the mainstream is complaining, there isn't much we can do to change this.

It's what the record companies think the consumers want. The consumers probably wouldn't really care either way, they know how to work a volume knob. And I believe it's been shown in studies that, while people like loud, they don't like dynamically compressed. But it's a lot easier for the record companies to push a few buttons and make everything loud than it is to master in proper dynamics.

 

[obobskivich]

I've read some articles/studies that contend that the heavy compression is a means of compensating for the average listener's habits - using earbuds or headphones with next to zero isolation to achieve "blocking" (and generally from something that can't get truly loud) - so mastering things at 0 dBfs makes the track listenable for a wider audience. Anyways, this is nothing new - it's been going on for literally decades - and it's unlikely to change any time soon, despite quite a lot of disgruntled people complaining on the Internet about it (remember, these same companies are still trying to figure out how to sue you for knowing they exist; give them another ten or fifteen years and they'll realize they actually make a product and that people actually have been buying it for a while (and this isn't a snarky "vote with your wallet" comment, this is more of a "they're oblivious" joke)). 
 
I've also read some articles that indicate that younger listeners actually consider artefacts like compression ringing and dynamic compression to be the "right" way for something to sound, and when introduced to a lossless or dynamically mastered cut of the same track, will note that something is "wrong" or "bad" about it. They're so used to 64k or 128k with half a dB of DNR through iBuds that they habituate to it, basically. Don't take this as a LCD comment - Head-Fiers habituate to the exact opposite, and both sides will voice distress if asked to "cross over." 
Quote:

It's what the record companies think the consumers want. The consumers probably wouldn't really care either way, they know how to work a volume knob. And I believe it's been shown in studies that, while people like loud, they don't like dynamically compressed. But it's a lot easier for the record companies to push a few buttons and make everything loud than it is to master in proper dynamics.