Some people like it (obviously, the "loudness war" would've never occurred if it didn't work commercially), some people don't.

My personal example of a song where it doesn't work is Johnny Cash's "Hurt". Around 3 minutes into the song, Johnny Cash's vocal noticeably distorts. From my perspective, the distortion is absolutely a loudness war phenomenon: if you look at the waveform in an editor, the song starts off pretty "hot" given that there's a very noticeable crescendos at the end. At the end of the song, where the music is pretty much maxing out, there is no bandwidth left. There is no other option to stand out but to push Johnny's voice to distortion.

I've seen people in message boards say the distortion in the vocals adds "intensity". Personally, I'd love to see an un-Loudness War version where Johnny Cash gets several dB more to cleanly sing over the music. Where dynamics, not distortion, is what is driving the intensity. For my tastes, it would be much preferred.

50 cent get rich or die trying is an excellent example of a poorly mastered album produced around the same time as well, vocals distorted throughout almost (if not) the entire album. I can't even imagine what the engineers were thinking when recording these, similar to the overuse of autotune in country these days - see george straight - cowboy walks away

That's a pretty homogeneous sample. I can't imagine Bergtatt or Beethoven's 6th being as enjoyable on a poorly mastered recording.

I agree that loud albums can still be amazing. Multiple albums on Wikipedia's 'loud' albums list [1] belong to my favorite albums of all time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war#Examples_of_.22lo... (not including the 'remasters')

I have to say that (IMHO) Prodigy went over the top with that on The Day Is My Enemy. Thing is you can hear it on the tails of the crash cymbals, you can hear them get ducked in a "stuttery" manner when the compression from the drums hits. Actually, great production technique should be able to work around that and make it both loud without messing up the cymbal tails (or maybe just truncate them, just not have them stutter).

I found the album a bit tiring to listen to because of the continuous loudness. No particular parts really stood out to me, because everything was just sort of loud and it just seemed to go in one ear, out the other. I could pay real close attention, one can always listen better :) But again it is a bit tiring and you can't do much else.

Then again, I just really prefer their first 2-3 albums, which have quite a different sound altogether.

And I'm curious which Oizo albums you're referring to? I love his stuff, and yes some of his tracks are quite loud, (but not all the time, the whole track), but they never quite struck me as a typical "loudness war" type of loudness. Unless I'm thinking of the wrong tracks here (No Day Massacre? Last Night a DJ Killed My Dog?), he seems to like to hit a well sound-designed overdriven bass buzz, with not too much else playing at the same time (and where it does, close attention to envelopes, cutting off hits, ms transient timings) if you do that right and just normalize to max amplitude, you're 95% of the way there (at which point my experience is that compression on top of that usually fucks up that careful detail work, but maybe I need more practice or a different plugin). Possibly I'm thinking of the wrong tracks here, at least you gave me an reason to re-listen his stuff with a different ear/attention (loudness sound-design), which is always interesting :)

It's a genre thing. Lotta dance music these days sounds wrong if it doesn't have the particular distortion of overdoing the hard limiter. Like rock'n'roll without distortion on the guitar.