Suhas Sreedhar writes about CD over-compression in IEEE Spectrum. It's a good 'un that goes beyond the usual hand-wringing to the real danger it poses.
"With music being compressed to have smaller and smaller dynamic ranges, the need for the next high-fidelity audio format vanishes. If record companies aren't making use of the full dynamic capability of CDs, then why bother moving to another format with even more potentially unused capability? And with the average consumer being either completely unaware of, or only subconsciously irritated by, the current state of overcompressed music, there is little incentive for sound quality to progress. Consequently, all the potential benefits of higher-quality audio—lifelike dynamic range, greater frequency response, and multichannel surround sound—remain unseen, even though the technology exists today. Audiophiles are forced to return to vinyl and analog recordings that should have been obsolete 20 years ago."
