[Torn Curtain]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

It's funny. My CD of Black Flag's Damaged (listed as one of the loudest albums ever) is really bloody quiet - making it a bit of a pain when doing CD mixes for people. The reason I mentioned Graceleands wasn't just some perverse slice of randomness, it was because it really does demonstrate the stupidity of current trends in music mastering. On the original, there's a fairly quiet intro section which, on current CD versions, is boosted to be as loud as the rest of the album. It's as though any idea of sonic dynamics being used as an artistic device is now disregarded in the industry's apparant quest for 'in your faceness'. They've even started doing it on some more mass-oriented Classical and Jazz oriented CDs - two types of music which often use variations in volume level as a creative tool.

Yep, compression sucks.