Sort of. Modern pop music is compressed, although we hear it isn’t as bad as it was. To some extent compression is an artistic tool, and back in the days of what I would call the glory days of rock and roll recording producers would be using devises like a LA-2 or a Fairchild 670 to liven up the sound. They still do. A local star oboe player was telling me that the final mastering of her latest chamber recording was going to go through one. But these steps are not the stupid steps that wreck the dynamic range of modern pop recordings.
The lack of dynamic range in many modern recordings clearly has nothing to do with the medium or the technology as there exist wonderful recordings. The problem is entirely down to production directed at a perceived target market. Many artists hate the final result but are told it is what is needed to succeed in the market. If your favourite artists are subject to such indignities it isn’t the fault of the technology.
Moreover there exist genres of music where idiotic dynamic compression is not applied and never has been.
That's all tangential to the point. There are numerous reasons for better DR in theater applications. Few (if any) audio only recordings are mastered with the expectations that they will only be listened to at reference volume in a silent room - or at least as silent as possible. On the other hand, music is mastered to sound good when played in cars, on the radio, in restaurants, clubs, over phone lines, etc. As a result only a small portion of largely classical music is allowed to have much DR at all - due more to the target consumer's playback conditions than anything else.
So when mastering digital soundtracks, silence needs to be silent (or better yet having some ambience but still feeling "empty") and explosions, screams, etc. need to be ear-splitting. If you did that with an album... there will be more complaints than accolades most likely. So technically there should be more of
everything in a SSP or AVR than you would have in an audio-only device... because it will likely be required at some point.
That ties in to
@amirm's criticism of the HTP-1 and a lower output level than specified (which I actually missed in the review the first time). That's a non-issue in a desktop DAC IMO, which is likely to be used with headphones only or near-field monitors with wide gain adjustments. However in a theater context - it's a much more daunting to deal with component matching amps when you possibly need ~12 of them and they're already in the rack by the time you realize you needed a
bit more output from the processor.
