I agree, and the newer Red Hot Chili Peppers albums are a perfect example of this. Ever look analyze a Muse CD? The audio looks like a solid block zoomed out.

I agree, and the newer Red Hot Chili Peppers albums are a perfect example of this. Ever look analyze a Muse CD? The audio looks like a solid block zoomed out. Not that Muse isn't awesome. The article seems to simplify the clipping issue a bit much, and it looks like some users here are confusing compression with maximization. Compression is the relatively simple process of reducing dynamic range above a certain threshold by a certain ratio. If the ratio is 2:1 and the threshold is -10db, then 0 db would end up at -5, -8 would end up at -9, etc. Then you'd just make up the loss in volume by boosting it an equivalent amount. There's also the attack and release, where attack allows the volume to rise above the threshold for a given amount of time (measured in milliseconds) before it is compressed, and release will raise the volume up over a period of time after the source has returned below the threshold. What's going on here, it's important to note, isn't quite compression. It's a much more complicated process involving potentially lots of different plugins and rack-mounted magic boxes that all sell for thousands of dollars. They focus specifically on the qualities of sound that make us perceive loudness, not just simple dynamic range. (Though, to be fair, one of the most interesting mastering tools is the multiband compressor, which splits the audio based on frequency, compresses each band separately, then mixes them back together.) Anyway, the focus of a 'loudness maximizer', as opposed to a compressor, is pure... loudness. That's where the clipping comes from, and that's actually how you get clipping without the sound actually sounding distorted and clipped. It's pushing the edge of distortion a little bit, and you can kind of hear that on poorly mastered loud recordings. It's a lot harder to get the same effect with a compressor and a hard limiter (which prevents the audio from going above a certain level no matter what - basically a compressor with an infinite ratio). edit: By the way, because of imperfections in the original compression hardware (and modern software simulations of said imperfections), the compression process isn't actually as straightforward as I said. In theory, that's how it works, but compressors are generally known to 'color' the sound a bit while they compress. In other words, the compressor that the Beatles ran vocals through is not capable of also giving you that pulsing, compressed sound you get from One More Time by Daft Punk. For example.