I have a lot of respect for Rick's technical and music skills. But there's one place he and I diverge which is compression. I was really surprised to hear him

I have a lot of respect for Rick's technical and music skills. But there's one place he and I diverge which is compression. I was really surprised to hear him compliment some really compressed audio saying it made it really crunchy, or something. Besides Clear Channel, at least IMHO over compression also drove people away from genres that used it. See the Loudness Wars Wikipedia entry for a good explanation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war I was a rock listener for a long time, but my local rock station spent the 80s and 90s adjusting their format just enough to kill off competitors and then swinging back to their tried and true format of the same tired songs. So some of this is definitely self-inflicted both in terms of format (unimaginative and rarely updated playlists) and presentation (heavily compressed audio) that drove me away.