I prefer original pressings whenever possible. It's still sometimes cheaper, but that is quickly going the other way.

Most people listen to music in their car. More compressed audio means less fiddling with the volume knob as you drive, regardless of normalization done by Spotify et al.

Anyhow that's my theory

Most headphones people actually use are crap. Yes you can buy studio monitors from sony. That isn't what people are listening to. They are using airpods which sound like earpods have always sounded: crap, absent lows, terrible separation. So you compress the hell out of the audio and make it loud so you can actually hear something with those headphones.

It's much less of a problem than it used to be because streaming platforms normalize the tracks anyway so it's been fading away for a while now.

As a mixing engineer:

1. Compressed sound can be an integral (wanted) part of different genre aesthetics. I personally love dynamic mixes, but if you let your customers A/B mixes they will often chose the more compressed/louder one. If your song sounds weak after another bands song, that is an issue.

2. For reasons of health/liability there are maximum levels on headphones and mobile playback devices. That means if my mix has a high dynamic range the bulk of it may really just be too low when played back on the majority of headphones. If I mix my own music this is a bargain I can make if I mix other peoples music I would try to be a little more on the cautious side if the musicians didn't demand a highly dynamic mix.

3. Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music. 90% of people who listen to music do not listen to it actively, they just let it run in the background or are passively exposed to it. Try listening to a good dynamic recording of Beethovens fith in your car with the window rolled down. You will hear some strong phrases then inbetween nothing as it is below the ambient noise floor.

Vinyl has the benefit, that I as the mixing engineer can assume that the listener will be much more likely actively involved with the music than say in a radio mix.

They are the same coked up idiots who did an end-run around Congress to the WIPO, to get their DMCA forced by treaty obligations back in the '90s.

The full dynamic range is nice if you actually want to experience it and have a system capable of reproducing it. A dedicated center channel with a few hundred watts of amplification behind it will cut through the ambient backdrop like a hot knife through butter. You can watch Transformers or MI3 at reference volume with crystal clear dialogue if you're willing to throw enough power at the problem.

That's just not true and vinyl doesn't sound better by any measure.

I'd say "rarely" instead of "often" though it depends on the genre I guess. There are also a lot of genres that can never sound as good on vinyl simply due to the lack of dynamic range/silence; mostly classical and electronic.

No, you need the original mix to remaster it yourself.

If you just amplify the whole track until its max amplitude reaches the medium's maximum, yes you could undo that.

But the loudness war aims to make the whole track even louder than that, by quietening those max peaks so they don't clip, then that gives you room to amplify the rest of the track even further. The dynamic range of the recording is permanently reduced.

"Assuming no clipping" is the biggest problem there, because the loudness wars resulted in a ton of very lossy clipping and similar artifacts. Arguably that sort of distortion became part of the expected sound, though, so just because it isn't reversible doesn't necessarily mean it is a problem.

In the open metadata world there is ReplayGain which analyzes music peaks and tries to create a negative gain to equalize the dynamic range to a standard volume at both the individual track and full album level.

Apple Music, Spotify, and others have proprietary but similar systems.

(As someone who deeply loves to shuffle an entire library, having a music player that supports ReplayGain has long been a personal requirement.)

Short answer, no not really. It won’t ever be as good as a proper uncompressed mastering

you can use an expander or something more advanced like Ozone 12's Unlimiter. you still lose signal when you compress even if you're not clipping so it won't be perfect

>it sounds more like what buyers today expect

Is that really true? Anybody buying music today instead of streaming is somebody who takes music more seriously than most. It seems likely they're going to care more about sound quality than the streaming audience.

And who, exactly, would approve that misguided proposal?

I suspect you’re not involved in contemporary record making. Like it or not, clipping is a technique and a color that producers, mixers, and mastering engineers all choose to impart for aesthetic and technical reasons. It has it’s uses.

If your proposal were passed all that would be left for consideration would be a handful lame DSD jazz records from those hi-fi enthusiasts who are disconnected from the reality around how most records are made these days.

I thought that due to physical limits of the media that mfgs would avoid this temptation -looks like I’m way off.

Why get a canvas print when you could put up a TV and display the picture digitally?