And if that is the case, what will be the point of investing in good equipment? Doesn't the quality of recordings themselves matter the most at the end of the day, and so matter how quality your gear is, nothing can make them truly sound better? I'm really intrigued by this one.
I've had some of the same considerations. Part of the problem is ultimately there's nothing we can do about the Loudness War probably. The big studios aren't going to listen to us. You can try to change your listening habits, but, what you actually like is what you actually like and ultimately there's only so much you can do in this respect. There's only so much listening to independent artists and that sort of thing that some of us can really do (just finding them alone is a huge uphill battle.)
To answer your your question though, I think that as the music itself gets less and less dynamic, more sensitive equipment becomes actually MORE necessary so you can pick out the details that are being further and further obscured. You didn't need very good equipment to hear some of the best stuff of some older music, but with dynamics being compressed more and more, it gets harder and harder to do things like hearing individual instruments as being, well, instruments rather than just noise.
And don't get angry, louder really sounds better, even to you!
I have to actually disagree with you there. My biggest problem is that I mostly listen to newer music because it's hard for me to find a lot of older music that I like. That said, when I do listen to older music, I invariably like the actual sound of it far better. (It's the music itself that I don't like as much.) I just love the sound of the drums or whatever when they have their full punch, and I can hear each individual instrument more the way it should be heard rather than it all blurring together into one big noise all at the same volume levels. To my ears, the full dynamics just sound so much better that it's not even funny. On the subject of newer music though, while I don't listen to the music that most listen to that you can get in games like Guitar Hero and etc, I've recently run into a situation much like that whole ordeal people had with the newer Metallica album. I recently got a music game that I enjoyed where I found that the music was kept in ATRAC3+ files in such a manner that I could
easily just decode and then combine them. Because they wanted it to sound "live" and semi-authentic -- and because they wanted each instrument to stand out and for the game to sound like a small band playing live rather than a big studio production -- there's really a much more minimal amount of processing to the music in that game. As such, when I combined them, I found that they sounded about 10x better to me versus the soundtrack versions of the exact same songs (and yes, as with the older music, each instrument stands out, vocals are better, and so on.) With this I've more or less confirmed my suspicions that newer music can still sound better if they didn't do compression of dynamics.
Anyway, I don't see how you can ever really hope to decompress the dynamics all that much. I get the distinct impression that they actually process each instrument even these days. If you use some tool to try to decompress the final sound, you're still only going to do so much. Short of somehow getting a hold of the original takes themselves before being mastered, there's just only so much you can really do (and I don't think that's going to happen...)
