What “dynamic range” means
What “dynamic range” means - Take sixty quick seconds and learn what it means when the audio engineers of today are required by record companies to produce music that is lower in quality than previous generations. By “lower in quality,” I do not mean the music itself.
You see, record companies want the albums from their artists to sound louder—especially useful on the radio, as the music competes with car noise. Yet, (to simplify) you can only program a CD to play between, say, 0 and 100 in loudness. Thus, for that “loud” sound, the entire dynamic range (the difference between the loud and soft parts of the track) gets compressed into the 98-100 region of loudness. Music has no “punch” and in some cases must be distorted to fit.