Here are the waveforms for the vocal and instrumental versions, plus a picture which shows a zoomed in portion of the vocal version near one of the points where it hits +1.0. The red vertical lines indicate where a sample hits either +1.0 or -1.0. The CD version for the original song has clearly been peak limited to make it louder and it does sound somewhat squashed when you listen to it, but compared to a hell of a lot of other recordings I have this isn't actually all that bad really. As you can see, the quieter sections are quite dynamic, so only the loudest parts of the song have suffered. With a lot of music I have the entire song looks just like the loudest parts of the vocal version, and often even worse, so I wouldn't call Skyfall a victim of the loudness war; this is just how majority of recordings are mastered these days. That's a bit sad but when I think back to recordings that were released about ten years ago things have actually gotten A LOT better for the most part. *snip*
Love what I've heard of it!
