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connector: ... it also depends a bit on the type of music ...
extracts from Stereophile January 2015, page 22
Mastering engineer Bob Katz writes about the "Loudness War" and "compression"
"Listeners accept far more distortion today than we did years ago. Many people have never heard a great stereo system - all they’ve heard are overdriven boom boxes, cheap stereos, and portable systems, and that’s what they expect systems and music to sound like. And distortion is part of the sonic language of such musical genres as hip-hop, rap, and alternative rock.
"Technically speaking, distortion is compression is distortion is compression. You can’t have one without the other: compression reduces peaks, and a distorted waveform has fewer peaks than a clean one... the important reason why many music professionals prefer distorted, closed-in, compressed sound over the clean, open version: Distorted music sounds louder!
"Popular-music producers take advantage of loudness every day to gain your attention - the loudness war has been going on for decades. The median loudness of LPs went up about 4dB between 1950 and 1980. The median loudness of the pop CD rose 9dB between 1979 and 2011. The impact, punch, clarity, soundstage, transient response, and microdynamics of recordings, all of which audiophiles consider desirable qualities, are affected by a recording’s peak-to-loudness ratio (PLR). Between 1980 and 2010, the median PLR of charting pop recordings decreased from 16.6 to only 8.9dB.
"To reproduce good-sounding transients, a medium needs a minimum headroom to accommodate peaks of 16dB above the loudness. But here’s the rub: a recording cannot have a high peak-to-loudness ratio and simultaneously be loud (at the same position of your volume control). This is why CD sound quality has deteriorated so much in 30 years ..."
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