A very good article in the Times about the loudness wars…
There was a potential downside to all this loudness. Many audio pros maintain that excessive loudness creates aural fatigue. We may not consciously notice it, they argue, but it makes us less likely to listen to music for extended periods. Although this is a difficult claim to prove, it is undeniable that decreased dynamic range has limited the sonic palette of recordings. When compact discs were introduced in the 1980s, one selling point was that they were capable of a greater dynamic range than vinyl records — yet the average pop recording today has a smaller dynamic range than records made during the analog era.
