The Death of High Fidelity

Rolling Stone has an interesting article on the phenomenon called the 'loudness war', where music released in recent times is being made louder by limiting its dynamic range so that all of it sounds as loud as possible, instead of having a wide range of loudness. The result is music that is more attention grabbing, but is devoid of the nuance and variation of the original. Music basically ends up more one dimensional and gimmicky, made only to hook you in and not meant to be really listened to and enjoyed. I've heard about this phenomenon many times and this article seems to put across what it's about fairly well, and is worth a read.