The Loudness Wars
Maybe you've heard about the so-called "Loudness Wars" being waged in audio production studios around the world. I'm going to show you an example of what that means.
The image below is a screen shot of a Pro Tools session. I imported a few audio tracks into the session straight off the CDs, choosing Metallica records for my sample tracks. The first track (in blue) is "The Thing That Should Not Be", from Master of Puppets. The second track (in green) is "Broken, Beat & Scarred", from Death Magnetic.
There are several reasons I'm using Metallica in this example. First, Master of Puppets is one of my favorite albums of all time. Second, it's old enough to have been mastered in the days before the loudness wars started — 1986, to be specific. Third, Death Magnetic, Metallica's 2008 release, was roundly criticized for being too loud, so it makes a good comparison to a track from the '80s that was mastered at a reasonable level. It's very easy to hear the difference.
So, what does the image say? If you're unfamiliar with the visual representation of sound in audio software, the energy/volume of the sound is represented by how tall the peaks of the waveform are. The taller the peaks, the louder the audio.
You can see that the waveform of the blue track from 1986 has headroom. The audio is nowhere near maximum volume, and the music is allowed to breathe. Loud parts can be loud, and quiet parts can be quiet. Compare that to the green track from 2008. Notice that the waveform looks almost squared off, indicating that the audio is nearly as loud as it can possibly be, nearly all the time. When music is produced this way, it kills dynamics and can make the music fatiguing to listen to.
The purple track is a blend of the two songs. I did absolutely no processing to these tracks. They are straight off the CD. Notice how much louder it gets when the newer song comes in. Take a listen...
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What can you do? If you're an artist, you can make sure that your music doesn't suffer from this problem. Don't ask the mastering engineer to "make it as loud as everyone else". Be sure to tell them that you'd rather preserve your music's dynamics even if it means being a few dBs quieter than other albums.
As a music consumer, there isn't much you can do. Music that has been squashed in the quest for more volume is already damaged. You can't un-squash it. The responsibility is with the people creating and selling the music to insist that their product is mastered at a reasonable level.