To what degree DR reflects SQ?

[fas42]

1 hour ago, sphinxsix said:

It reminded me of the 24bit pre-master of a certain jazz-rock band (it's actually downsampled 32bit material), which to me has been almost unlistenable due to its huge dynamics.

 

 

Care to share the name?

[fas42]

A rule of thumb is that if a recording has natural DR encoded, and there are inherently huge level, sound intensity swings, then the playback has to have high integrity - otherwise, when it goes soft, the sound will be boring, drab; and when it goes loud, the system starts to fall apart - the levels of obvious distortion are too great, and you'll run to turn it down.

 

So, clever compression is an artful dodge to get good sounding playback on sub-par setups - the bad, current over-compression is just a fashion, and will start to really die out when enough audio playback out there works well enough, for more people to be downright annoyed at silly mastering decisions.