Welcome to a long, long time ago, but this is still worth noting for those not familiar with the loudness war. I question the validity of your second sentence though: is that an effect of precedence, or legitimate? Why did you just suddenly recognize this?
First off you should know a couple of things:
A) I'm almost 40
B) I've been out of the car audio (or any audio) game for about 10 years.
Lately when setting up a system I will use music to tune with. Always have, always will. So I figure a more modern recording will have better (cleaner) sound for level matching and light tuning. Not to mention it's what the end user listens to as well.
But to me, everything sounds crappy. I was wanting to blame it on the equipment. "This new equipment sucks compared to what we had back in the day. " OMG I was turning into one of those old, pipe smoking, suspender wearing, bearded home audio weirdos with their tube amps and reel to reels.
Even my system that I've been working on for over a month (build log coming soon) sounded "crappy" to me no matter what I did. I just bought a 31 band EQ to tune it ,which probably would have told me what the problem was once I put an RTA on it, but until then I was questioning my sanity. It's very difficult to level match your mid/high amp with your sub amp when the music is compressed this much. Why are the drums always muddy? Now I know why...
Tonight, I broke out some old Telarc discs and some of my autosound2000 discs and did a little quick tuning, and BAM...night and day. Perfect? No. But I just made a huge step in the right direction.
Granted, I deserve a huge kick in the *** because I should have been using these tools for tuning the entire time. But I made a mistake and assumed, or was just plain lazy. A little of both.
How come I never noticed? I noticed, but I never gave much thought to WHY. Being "old" I do most of my listening at home. Same equipment for over 10 years. In the past few years I've become much more interested in modern jazz and country instead of rock because it sounds so much better on my home stereo. I really thought I was just getting old and talk radio was the next step in my evolution. But dammit, I like rock. I really like it. WTF. I don't think I've ever done an A/B comparison to Nickelback and The Tarney Spencer Band. If I did listen to something old it was something like "The Descendents" that has a crappy recording quality anyway. Now that I pull out those old forgotten recordings and listen carefully, I'm amazed.
Slowly, over time, I never noticed the record industry was screwing me . Like that frog in the boiling water? But do a back to back comparison and the difference is stunning.
It was a small epiphany for me and I thought it would help some others to understand how this affects their listening experience.
