This is something I found out about recently. Listening to these clips (and the loads of other examples around) it's pretty crazy how big a difference in quality there is between a very compressed song and a not compressed song. It's funny because I had sometimes found that listening to older albums was less tiring. I didn't really consciously realize what was going on, but watching this video definitely made sense to me. Anyways, hopefully the record companies stop doing this. The Loudness War - YouTube