AES Journal Forum

Yes, if a large majority of listeners preferred the sound of hypercompression. To the best of my knowledge, no such study has been done.

As discussed in more detail in the convention paper from which this Journal article was hypercompressed, it's likely that preferences may vary for different listeners and listening situations. If that's true, then the optimal scenario might be for the mastering engineer to apply a little less compression, to satisfy listeners who prefer more dynamic range, and allow the playback device to perform additional compression when desired (for mobile, background, or late night listening, masking of ambient noise, or according to personal preference).

A somewhat less optimal, but still acceptable, scenario would be to apply a compromise amount of compression that would preserve some dynamics and still work pretty well for everyone. Widespread adoption of automatic loudness normalization could help facilitate this.

The worst-case scenario would be that decisions are based largely on unproven sales assumptions, instead of sound quality. I suspect this may be the current situation. If, in fact, hypercompression drives away more customers than it attracts, this may even be a lose-lose scenario for both sales and sound quality. There is little solid evidence one way or another.

My article was primarily intended to question assumptions and call for further study, though it may have veered a bit more toward advocacy than was prudent. At any rate, if anyone is aware of evidence I've overlooked, or would care to contribute original research on the topic, I'd be interested to see it.
 

The question of interest to me was whether, all other things being equal, consumers prefer louder, hypercompressed music. While I don't see evidence of a correlation between hypercompression and better sales among the albums that reached the Billboard top 200, the albums that charted did indeed tend to be more compressed than those that did not. This correlation does not necessarily imply that consumers prefer hypercompressed music. In fact, I suspect your suggestion is correct,  that hypercompression is the price for getting on the charts in the first place. (This correlation could also relate to genre and other factors.)

So have industry gatekeepers rigorously studied this issue and proven that hypercompression results in greater sales, given the same level of promotion? Or is this largely groupthink, superstition, loudness envy, old wives tales (apologies to old wives), and self-fulfulling prophecy on the part of the record companies? I don't know, but to me the fact that there seems to be little or no correlation between sales and compression among the heavily-promoted top 200 suggests the latter. Given that compressed music doesn't necessarily sound better on FM or through chains of digital codecs, and especially as the world moves toward loudness normalization, hypercompression may yield little or no sales advantage (again, given the same amount of promotion).

Regarding this comment: "The fact is, the record company won't accept the master unless it is compressed to pump out the volume on FM radio or iTunes..."    That may be the case for some record companies, and not for others.  It may also depend on the genre of music—a jazz label may not have this attitude, a hip-hop label probably would.  

But one thing is clear—there are people in the record companies, as well as studio clients, who need to be educated about what happens to music that is played on terrestrial radio.  As most on this forum know, radio stations have dynamic processors that limit peaks and level out average volumes.  The more aggressively loud stations use these dynamic processors heavily, other stations (say, NPR affiliates) less so.  But in every case, anything played over the air will be peak limited and have its average level adjusted to match other programming on that station.  So, if you submit a hypercompressed CD to a radio station, when played on the air its level will be lowered to match other programing.  And a CD with wide dynamic range will be compressed and boosted to match other programming.  

Robert Orban (designer of the most popular broadcast processing line) is emphatic that music that has been only moderately compressed sounds better when sent through his processors than music that has been hyper-compressed.  Frank Foti (designer of another popular line of broadcast processors) agrees with Orban.  Studio clients and record companies need to be told this—if necessary, over and over.  Making it as loud as possible does not make it sound good on the radio--quite the opposite.

As for iTunes and related download services, they are a somewhat different beast.  However, most designers of digital audio compression codecs agree that music submitted for encoding should have about 2 dB of headroom.  Music that goes right up to digital zero can, in some cases, cause internal distortion in these codecs.  And at Fraunhofer (the designers of the MP3 codec), they have stated that hyper-compressed material does not encode and decode well, as the MP3 codec was designed around a pyscho-acoustic model that assumes normal dynamic range.  Put highly compressed material through the codec and that model starts to break down, and you get audible artifacts.  Again, clients and record companies need to be told this—if necessary, over and over.

Finally, iTunes and other media players (like WinAmp) are increasingly using normalization algorithms to adjust the relative volumes of different tracks.  A listener who uses this feature will not hear a hyper-compressed track as being louder than one that is not.  In short, the increasing use of loudness normalization renders the loudness race irrelevant.   Again (notice a pattern here?), clients and record companies need to be told about this.