Loudness War Mastering

Sadly, loudness war mastering is still common. People still listen to music in cars and on phone speakers. Low dynamic range sounds better with noisy listening environments and bad playback equipment.

I've heard that was done to CDs as well. E.g. people psychologically prefer louder music so mastering practices have done this at the expense of dynamic range.This kind of explains it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_warhttp://georgegraham.com/compress.html

The situation reminds of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Well, you might want to read this:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

true - but are you implying audio engineers are now leaning into heavy compression for artistic reasons?

You're missing the analogy; it's the artifacts introduced by an AAA[1] mastering process that are audible.1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARS_code

Compressing means giving up on the dynamics. It's a lossy process. E.g. the drummer started a subtle crescendo, that lasted a few bars, and now it's gone because everything sounds the same.BTW, came to post about the warshttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

I think you'd want to look for dynamic range compression among other things.

You may be looking for "dynamic range compression":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression

Audiophile grade equipment doesn't clip transients at normal listening volume. I agree that compression can help with poor quality equipment, but at the cost of permanently harming the sound on good equipment. Nobody complains about acoustic live music having too much dynamic range. The proper place for dynamic range compression is in the playback equipment, not baked into the audio data (DVDs/Blurays get this right with AC3 DRC). And compression used as an effect on individual instrum