Dynamic Compression & The Record Industry: You're not getting your CDs worth

[ucrags84]

This article, and other explain what you may already know about the loudness war in music recording:
The Death of High Fidelity : Rolling Stone

It upsets me that when you buy an actual CD from a popular rock or pop group, the sound quality may necessarily suck and lose a lot of the dynamic qualities because of dynamic compression used to make the recording "louder".

When listening to my reference collection of classical music, Yo Yo Ma among them, which was mastered without that kind of Dynamic Compression, I can immediately tell the difference in recording quality. Some of my older pop CDs just sound better, as a result compressed files from those CDs are of higher quality than those of today.

 

[Ham Sandwich]

Welcome to the age of the loudness war.

The Rolling Stone article is good. But they mixed in both dynamic compression and lossy compression in the same article which can confuse the issues and the reader. Dynamic compression (the Loudness War) is a completely different kind of compression compared to lossy compression (MP3). Completely different. They should have left lossy compression out of the article and just focused on dynamic compression. Save the lossy compression for a separate article.

A CD with only a few dB of dynamics is not CD quality.