I will still occasionally buy CDs (I bought my first player in 1984 - the Sony CDP-101), but I'm a lot more critical about what I buy now. For the past 10-ish

I will still occasionally buy CDs (I bought my first player in 1984 - the Sony CDP-101), but I'm a lot more critical about what I buy now. For the past 10-ish years, the studios have been eliminating dynamic range and cranking the knob on their compression software to "11". As a result, music has become painful to listen to. The name for this is the Loudness War, and with the exception of titles like Daft Punk's Random Access Memories, we are losing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war And here's an audio sample demonstrating what it sounds like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ