[soundwave106]

I don't think today's professional mastering engineers are "poor" necessarily; some of this I think is marketing pressure. The Loudness War (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war) is a real thing and a large part of the decrease in modern mastering quality, in my opinion.

The thing is, this mastering technique has some upsides for both casual listening (it will stand out more from the rest of the pack) and also will sound "louder" on poor equipment without necessarily exceeding the equipment's capabilities. The significant downside is that a lot of the detail is lost at best, and at worst you get very audible clipping / distortion or unnatural "pumping" effects. So not good at all for those that go deeper in their music.

"Optimizing for all cases" might help end this loudness war though. Many of the online streaming services (Youtube, Spotify, iTunes, etc.) have some optimizing routines that aim for consistency in volume level. The net result is that extremely over-compressed music sound dull and flaccid.

Many articles recommend more sensible overall loudness levels now... although I haven't seen a specific LUFS number to hit, like there is for European television (EBU R128), aiming for something like -16LUFS as this article mentions is a much better situation than before.

See: https://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb14/articles/loudness-war...