Confusingly, the article is about two different types of compression. The type of compression you're talking about is compression of dynamic range, which has been an issue since before mp3 players.

Then there is lossy data compression, which also distorts sound, but in different ways. It tends to make high end percussion sound like it's being filtered through bubbly water, for example.

Then they were also taking about increasing sample rates and bit depths, which is another question altogether, and (I think) much less significant than the other two issues.

A factor in the prevalence of compression in popular music that is not often mentioned is the effects of the music production technology, specifically the cheap akai samplers that were used a lot in the 1980s and 90s. They only had a 12 bit sample rate and so had a very small dynamic range. This led to a fetishisation of the "chunky" sound it imparted on samples, especially drums. Then producers seeking this effect further compressed their samples to make them sound even chunkier. Here's an example from 1995: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fkWMrw4nFY#t=1m39s and another from 1993: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu9Ml51vDrM

In these scenarios, over-compression is a legitimate artistic choice: it's meant to sound like that. The problem is obviously when this expectation bleeds out into the rest of the music industry and is forced upon other types of artists by their labels.

> our 21st century ears are so used to compressed music that old Beatles albums sound too quiet to us.

I wouldn't mind so much that an album is quiet, if any MP3 player actually allowed me to turn it up to a reasonable level (letting me sacrifice the listening experience on my own terms, when and if applicable.) Why is VLC the only* piece of software to combine volume level and compression-gain into a single output slider?

* Amusingly, the iPod's software knows how to apply compression just-in-time--but it only does it if you've applied a "volume adjustment" pragma to the song in iTunes. And then whenever the song comes up, you have to turn down your volume slider from 80% to 30% to avoid having your ears fall off, because "loud" on desktop speakers is a very different thing than "loud" on in-ear headphones.

That's because music listening has traditionally been about source reproduction and I hope this remains the case. Sure you can apply compression or whatever if you want, but you're going to destroy the sonic quality of the recording even more, and, as an audio engineer, I hope software manufacturers keep "limiting" your freedom in this regard (sorry for the pun...).

Reproducing source audio level doesn't help when you're e.g. listening to something on a plane, with a large amount of background noise, and you want to actually hear the damn thing. Users' opinions count for something too.

While the compression is obviously a problem, I am always just as worried about the fact that the mixes are for the lowest common denominator. For years most engineers I knew would mix so that the song was listenable on NS-10's (which are complete crap). Now I would assume the mix is probably tested more on a set of white earbuds.