Loudness War

I don't think you are being thick at all and this is a very good point, but there are significant data contradicting this notion of intent by artists: vinyl releases maintain the dynamic range of the original masters; CD releases are dynamically compressed.

This is true for loads of modern / recent albums. This indicates that plenty of artists are playing with dynamic range to make their music interesting, which is consistent with basic music theory, and then studios are compressing the dynamics of the master for the mass release on CD. I understand why studios do it, since the majority of music is consumed in noisy environments, and low volume cues would be missed if not "raised". I appreciate that some genre's are simply "loud" on purpose, and many great artists have "loud" songs. But the current "loudness" trend is not the result of artists playing to what we want to hear, or artists wanting us to hear "loud". It is an adjustment by studios to provide more reliable consumption by masses.

These days, with processing power what it is, it would be much nicer if car radios / portable players had an option that allowed you to take a song, and compress it dynamically if the environment required it. This would have been difficult to do well in the 90s, but not at all hard now.

 

With hi-res it's completely unpredictable from one release to the next if it will have a decent dynamic range. It's arbitrary.

 

It would not effect my reaction to music that has extreme dynamic range compression/limiting, whether it was an artistic choice or not. I'm aware that there is significance to this distinction for some.

No matter who made the decision or why, it will feel/sound the same to me.

Deliberate artistic choices have also resulted in music that I personally do not care for: songs, albums and probably entire musical careers.