Just found this thread. Sadly it is the histrory repeating itself. When stereo LP records appeared in the late 50's the dynamics on the record were phenomenal. But the equipment to play them , rather poor. Also the demand for more minutes of music together made the industry to reduce dynamics. If memory serves me well, it was on the 1974 new year speech that the big boss of EMI said something like: "nice those multi channel recording techniques, but i prefer the 2 or 3 channel tape recording, as that is music" .
In the late seventies Jean Hiraga (L'audiophile) demonstrated the huge difference in dynamics of record player cartridges, the Shore and Stanton and Ortofon being the biggest offenders. At that time the only pre-amplifiers that could fully deal with the dynamics, using.i a vdHul modified EMT mc cartridge were electronics without any feedback. Be it tube or transistor, provided the transistors or tubes had enough idle current running them also hotter than normal those days.
Then came the CD, but about at the same time portable players emerged, discman and ghetto blasters. As these are not made for playing high dynamics, but the owners were buying CD's en masse. Thus CD's were mixed and mastered to play well on these devices, so no real bass, but instead some boom around 80-100Hz, and limited dynamics. Also distorsion was deliberately added, as that made the sound appear more loud.
And so on. Parallel to this there was also the different concepts of the recording, just 2 or 3 mic's or a mic on every instrument and voice, the european way versus the american way etc.
To summarize, it is not so much the technical dimension, more the commercial dimension, i.o.w. make much money instead of spending money on quality. I recently read somewhere that 75% of the music rights is owned by just 3 companies. They are there for the shareholder value, not for the best possible music reproduction.