As anyone who has mixed a record knows, you have to to well out of your way to make a mix that can compete with modern major label recordings in terms of RMS loudness.

Pretty much everyone in the audio recording industry agrees that this loudness war is not helping music one bit. In fact, most people who get their music mastered for maximum volume like the sound better before the music was mastered (at least on the studio monitors they album was mixed on).

When an mixing engineer works long hours to get a mix to sound exactly like he/she envisions, it doesn't make a lot of sense to go in and just smash the hell out of the mix with a limiter. If the mixing engineer wanted to sound that way, it wouldn't be difficult for him/her to do it, in most cases.

Either way... On one hand, we have the loudness wars where labels think they are going to sell less cds if the music has less RMS loudness. On the other had, MP3s are extremely popular. So what?

Well, anyone who has spent a significant amount of time listening to downloaded mp3s knows that the volume level of MP3s jumps all over the place. I'm guessing that it's quite common for a person to tinker with an mp3 before it gets downloaded by millions of people. Of course, the difference in levels could just be normal when switching from a song in one genre and time to a song from a totally different genre and time. Switching from Maroon 5 to Hootie and The Blowfish to The Beach Boys will result in insanely different volume levels, but this level of diversity seems to be very common in mp3 collections.

It seems to me that there is a glaringly obvious contradiction between the labels insisting on louder and louder cds at the expense of the listener (whether they realize it or not) and the fact that so many people who listen to mp3s are bouncing around from mp3 to mp3 without any care at all in terms of the volume level.

So, maybe this is one example that the buying public doesn't give a damn if a song sounds a tad quieter than another song. The Ipod had sold a zillion billion trillion units and everyone of them has the volume control in the user's hand. It seems that this is also the case when listening in the car, on the computer, or with a stereo system that has a remote control. I know of no one who even thinks twice about adjusting the volume control. In fact, ride with a friend in the car and count how many times the driver adjusts the volume. Also, count how many times the listener runs out of volume...(meaning a cd can't be turned up enough to be heard at the desired level).

Brandon