Hi there,
Been MIA from this forum for a long long time, been spending most of my time looking at stuff on head-fi.org, staring blankly at headphones, looking at amps and all that jazz.
Well here I am now.
Loudness Wars.
Well, sound engineers are pumping up the volume in most musical tracks and reducing the dynamics of the songs that are played. There are a lot of cut offs when you look at the waveforms. There is absolutely no reason for the song to be louder because we can always turn the volume up to our own listening volume according to our preferences.
Sadly this is not the case because we live in an era where louder is better. Nothing can be done.
There is no more Miles Davis or Pink Floyd quality recordings, all has gone down the drain. Older albums are better. So is the case for Radiohead at least, with The Bends "sounding" better on Fake Plastic Trees than Paranoid Andriod on OK Computer.
Links for you to see :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
http://brianstagg.co.uk/p_t_a_clipressed/