SI, i was interested by the technical debate published in teh wiki voice you linked. Interestingly enough, even among the specialist professionals, no agreement has been reached. The other way around.
In 2007, Suhas Sreedhar published an article about the loudness war in the engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum.[33] Sreedhar said that the greater possible dynamic range of CDs was being set aside in favor of maximizing loudness using digital technology. Sreedhar said that the overcompressed modern music was fatiguing, that it did not allow the music to "breathe".[33]
In September 2011, Emmanuel Deruty wrote in Sound on Sound, a recording industry magazine, that the loudness war has not led to a decrease in dynamic variability in modern music, possibly because the original digitally-recorded source material of modern recordings is more dynamic than analogue material.[30] Deruty and Damien Tardieu criticized Sreedhar's methods in an AES paper, saying that Sreedhar had confused crest factor (peak minus RMS) with dynamics in the musical sense (pianissimo to fortissimo).[47] Deruty and Tardieu analyzed the "loudness range" (LRA) over a 45-year span of recordings, and observed that the crest factor of recorded music diminished significantly between 1985 and 2010, but the LRA remained relatively constant.[30]
This analysis has been challenged on the basis that the LRA was designed for assessing loudness variation within a track while the EBU R128 Peak to Loudness Ratio (PLR) is a measure of the peak level of a track relative to a reference loudness level. Ian Shepherd and Bob Katz wrote that PLR is a more helpful metric in assessing overall perceived dynamic range which shows a trend toward reduced dynamic range throughout the 1990s.[48][49]
Debate continues regarding which measurement methods are most appropriate to evaluating the loudness war.[50][51][52]
