The "volume wars" predate CDs, but tended to be fought by the radio stations themselves. Virtually every radio station (I worked in college radio) had a dynamic

The "volume wars" predate CDs, but tended to be fought by the radio stations themselves. Virtually every radio station (I worked in college radio) had a dynamic processor that managed signal levels for maximum loudness. The conventional wisdom was that people would choose the loudest station when listening in their cars. Commercials were mixed as loud as possible too. The use of compression in this way may have emanated from the fact that the station already needed to have a compressor limiter in the signal chain, to prevent overmodulation, which could earn you a fine from the FCC. I was told to dial the compressor to within a gnat's ass of 100% modulation. How the two recordings sound in your phone or laptop might be clouded by those devices also processing your sound to make tiny speakers sound louder. A popular processor was the Orban Optimod, so I checked to see if it's still in production, nearly 40 years later: https://www.orban.com/optimodfm-8700i https://www.orban.com/optimodfm-8700i Ironically, the new model claims that it "brings hyper-compressed music back to life."