[Somnambulist]

Thought this was interesting. Apple are globally rolling this out:
http://www.apple.com/itunes/mastered-for-itunes/
 
From the PDF:
 
 

[size=10pt] Whether you’re mastering a whisper-quiet zen flute tone poem or a heavy metal guitar  fest, volume is a key issue. The main tools used in mastering—equalization,  compression, limiting, or combinations of these—are all different ways of controlling  aspects of volume. Making decisions about gain levels, dynamic range, and frequency  response is what mastering is all about. Many artists and producers feel that louder is better. The trend for louder music has  resulted in both ardent fans of high volumes and backlash from audiophiles, a  controversy known as “the loudness wars.” This is solely an issue with music. Movies, for  example, have very detailed standards for the final mastering volume of a film’s  soundtrack. The music world doesn’t have any such standard, and in recent years the de  facto process has been to make masters as loud as possible. While some feel that overly  loud mastering ruins music by not giving it room to breathe, others feel that the  aesthetic of loudness can be an appropriate artistic choice for particular songs or  albums. Analog masters traditionally have volume levels set as high as possible, just shy of  oversaturation, to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). With digital masters, the goal  is to achieve the highest gain possible without losing information about the original file  due to clipping. With digital files, there’s a limit to how loud you can make a track: 0dBFS. Trying to  increase a track’s overall loudness beyond this point results in distortion caused by  clipping and a loss in dynamic range. The quietest parts of a song increase in volume,  yet the louder parts don’t gain loudness due to the upper limits of the digital format. A less obvious issue when setting gain for digital masters can occur on playback.  Whether it's a compressed file like an AAC file or an uncompressed file such as a CD,  digital data goes through several processes to be converted to an analog signal for  playback. One common process is called oversampling. This upsamples the digital data at four  times the original sample rate to improve the quality of the digital audio signal being  converted to analog. If the original digital audio data is at 0dBFS, oversampling can  result in undesirable clipping. And if the original was already clipped, oversampling can  make it worse. A growing consensus is emerging that digital masters should have a  small amount of headroom (roughly 1dB) in order to avoid such clipping. In both digital and analog, the highest possible level will vary from track to track,  depending on the material being mastered. Your decision about the volume and  loudness of your tracks is a technical and creative choice. You might decide to take the  listener on a dynamic journey through an album as a complete work, raising and  lowering the volume level across the sequence of tracks to increase the music’s  emotional impact. Alternately, you might pursue the loudest possible signal at all times. Whatever you decide—exquisitely overdriven and loud, or exquisitely nuanced and  tasteful—we will be sure to encode it and reproduce it accurately. We only ask that you  avoid clipping the signal.

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Apple trying to force some standards? No more clipping in popular music? Also I see they ask to be given the high quality masters... suggesting lossless/hi-res stuff from the store in future.

 

[Head Injury]

While I'm glad they're taking some initiative against the Loudness War, I hope CDs are going to be shipped with a stupid "Mastered for iTunes" label on them in the future.

 

[Allforheather]

they actually post some of their theory behind the process, looks very promising with fairly detailed explanation of the importance of 24bit resolution and how they think they'd achieved the quality with a 16bit file. Not only that, they even talked about dithering, aliasing etc....
 
here is a link to the article for all that's interested. 
http://images.apple.com/itunes/mastered-for-itunes/docs/mastered_for_itunes.pdf

 

[MorbidToaster]

Well...We'll see how this works out I suppose.

 

[Avalon0387]

I downloaded the title track from Elton John's "Madman Across the Water" in Mastered for iTunes. I am listening to it through an external DAC and Atomic Floyd Super Darts earphones.
I have to say, I am impressed. The quality may not match HD Tracks, but it sounds pretty darn good.
 
However, I later downloaded the newer Mastered for iTunes version of "When the Tigers Broke Free" from Pink Floyd's "The Final Cut". The shells bursting in the background didn't have nearly the impact of the ripped CD version from the album, "Echoes". You FELT that version. Same earphones, but a different DAC.
 
So maybe it will all depend on the source material. Time will tell.