[mbell]

There is value to constant volume, but I think a lot of the loudness war came from a time when there implementing a compressor on the user's side was expensive. It's trivially cheap now, basically every device you own that can produce audio now is capable of implementing a decent digital compressor with no additional hardware costs and about 5 minutes of an software engineer's time. If this wasn't hard when the loudness war set in, we'd probably just have a checkbox that defaults to 'on' in all these devises instead of the master being messed up. In other words, the timing of cheap, low power audio DSPs missed the boat by a couple years.