[crististm]

21st century music is beyond loud. Is as loud as the medium allows it. You can't imagine how loud it is. There is no silence in this music. Every microsecond of it is recorded as if there are no bits in the quiet end of the loudness range.

This is one important reason why the music on vinyl sounds nicer. Not because of the harmonics, but because of the mastering. The medium does not allow very high dynamics and you need to compromise.

[JonnieCache]

I agree with you that a lot of modern music (especially pop) is overcompressed. But the loudness war is not as simple as people would have you believe. It really depends on how you calculate RMS: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep11/articles/loudness.htm

Also, like I said above, it's about conveying the intention of the artist. While that recent metallica album sounded like shit and might have been better if it were mastered for vinyl, the wax pressing of the below-linked record sounds boring and lifeless because it lacks the downloadable version's obscene dynamic range:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JWx_ukdUbM

[omegaham]

This confuses the hell out of me. Why would you make a CD loud and distort the sound when there's a volume knob? It takes just as much (or little) effort to turn the volume to 30 as it does to turn it to 10.

Albums like Death Magnetic are particularly egregious examples of this, but I think that every CD suffers somewhat from this obsession with making the CD itself so damn loud. We have amplifiers for a reason.

[JonnieCache]

Because you want it to sound louder than the previous record when it's played on the radio, or in the past, the jukebox.

Yeah, I know.