Early CDs, certainly pre 1995, do seem to be much better from the point of view of clipping or heavy compression and limiting. I've mentioned this before, but all my Dire Straits CDs, bought when they first were published, have no clipping and have peak levels several dBs under 0dBFS. Ditto Moody Blues and Santana CDs of a similar vintage. Then TC Electronics invented the Finalizer and it all went to rat-shit.Sadly, true. I listen mostly to classical which doesn't have this problem. But recently I got Rival Sons' latest album Feral Roots based on a recommendation from a friend. The first few seconds revealed it was so distorted and crunched it was practically unlistenable. So I got curious and ran some tools. Turns out measures a paltry DR5, with massive clipping all over the place. If I were in that band I'd be angry at the recording engineers for screwing up my work and art!
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The irony is, they have a 96-24 download for an album that has so little dynamic range it could be transferred to 8-bit! I didn't want to unfairly judge it by classical music standards, so I measured Pink Floyd Wish You Were Here for comparison, which measures DR14 with no clipping.
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