Why do mass marketed CD's sound so crappy?

Rockethouse...If you used a finger, instead of a toe, your system would be "digital" :-)

Rockethouse...My point was that there is a way to limit dynamic range without the kind of distortion caused by electronic compression..."Gain riding". For those unfamiliar with the term, this means manual gain control in real time by a recording engineer who is familiar with the music, and knows ahead of time when the loud and soft passages are coming up. He slowly "sneaks" the gain up or down a bit so as to avoid recoding problems. When I made recordings, this was how I did it because I didn't have any fancy recording equipment with compression.

Sean...Your rant about tonal balance of recordings is exactly the reason why you need at least tone controls and perhaps an equalizer in your playback system.

Compression is not always as bad as you say. The most benign form of compression is "gain riding" (manual gain control). This causes no distortion or "smearing". The objections you raise would apply to "fast attack" compression and/or peak limiting.

I once had a dbx expander/compressor, the main use of which was to further compress recordings when I put them on tape for use in a car. Using this device I did make an interesting discovery: compression, and at the end of a recording, the fadeout, is evidently based on the common mode (A+B) signal, and this kills natural ambience which is generally differential (A-B) in the recorded signal. By compressing based on the A-B signal quite astonishing results were obtained with a matrix multichannel system. This seemed to be a bit different from the gain control logic used by the better decoders.