Over the past 20 years, the recording and mastering of recorded music has been increasingly plagued by an industry-wide practice of making recordings as loud as possible, while crushing any dynamics contained in the original performance.

The result is music that sounds flat, two-dimensional, distorted, and is exhausting to listen to.

This self-defeating race to be “louder” than anyone else has become known as the Loudness Wars. You can read more about it at Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war – or see an example at YouTube – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ .