I was just reading a fascinating article on the Death of High Fidelity:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/17777619/the_death_of_high_fidelity

Pearl Jam has for the most part let their albums have more breathing room without too much over-compression. But you can't help but think that our opinions towards certain albums have a lot to do with our ear's perceptions and what type of listening we are accustomed to. For example, as a fan of Ten/Vs/Vitalogy, I was used to that era of recording technology (Ten being famously quiet when compared to new CDs) but those are the dynamics my ears are used to. People who might be into the band for their later work could possibly be more inclined for the heavier-compressed sounds of today. Ultimately we would need someone who could check out some of the waves from RA and S/T to see what the compression levels are like but I was shocked when I saw these :

Black from the original Ten CD (1991)


Black from Rearviewmirror Greatest Hits (2004)

I've read that record companies want this compression/loudness.
It's weird that it's so often used on PJ songs. It really decreases the aural perception of songs.

I think it's effect on PJ albums has been very much evident from the Binaural era onwards...though the people responsible for producing/mastering those records presumably have to be taken into account too.

Grievance is the first casualty/example that springs to mind. You only need to hear that song live, and then listen to the studio cut to hear the difference in dynamics.

That blocky thing you see in the second picture is the engineers work as i know. You can tell by the way it looks that it's bad.
For a band with 3 guitars, organ, bass, drums this is just wrong. What it does basically is making it sound closer to mono. Some records up to the mid 60's when mostly 4 tracks were used could sound stronger in mono because not all of the instruments were recorded on separate tracks and couldn't be mixed very well in stereo. Doing this know is weird. It really is done for the music to sound louder.
It can't be done on vinyl though.

Only the highest peaks should ever come close to touching the 100% line in those graphs. Anything that looks like the second one is just poor workmanship. If you want the levels higher, turn up the volume.

The second image is, indeed, what the industry looks like today. The trend towards overcompression hit in the late 90's, and has continued ever since. However, this is not an engineer issue necessarily. The desired levels are usually something that is communicated between the band (or producer) and the mastering house.

One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of those old records you've bought remastered versions of, one of the reasons they keep rereleasing those is the improvement in the technology's ability to increase volume without making compression audible to the human ear. There weren't tons of people rushing the board to bitch about the new mixes from the greatest hits package sounding smooshed, that I noticed. If you enjoyed the remastering on Springsteen's Born to Run, that was flattened a little bit from the original. I don't remember anybody jumping on that, either. It actually takes a lot of compression, with the newer devices, to even make a small dent in the sound of the mix. A good mastering compressor manned by a solid engineer can top 10 decibels before anyone in the room can tell at all.

I'm not a fan of it at all, mind you, but we're not talking about that massive a change.

When you talk about Binaural's sound, you're talking mostly about Tchad's bus and and in-line compression, which serves a different purpose really. Blake is not known by any measure to be a compression hog, although he sometimes like to use what is called additive compression. He's talked before about double-tracking a signal, compressing one of the tracks until it distorts, and then adding the two together, so you end up with a very lightly compressed recording that still has compression distortion. He likes the tone it creates.

I only know that Black sounds way better in RVM.

thanks to Brendan O'brien

we're mixing our album, soon off to the mastering studio and since i read that piece in RS i'm puzzled because i love nuance and space in music but i want our record to sound as loud as everybody else's on the radio. i know radio stations have compressors/limiters but is the real compression issue with the digital music consumers? i listen to Blood On The Tracks and if i want it as loud as contemporary recordings, i crank up the volume...

Well, Brendan didnt do anything very "special" in this case, he just did a very professional mix, very clear (specially the bass), almost audiophile like.

exactly

Like I said above, if you're working with a mastering studio worth its salt...even the less expensive ones...they should be able to add a decent amount of volume with no audible change in the actual sound. You'd be surprised (or maybe not), but virtually every band or artist walking into a studio ends up asking a question like this on their first record, and a few keep worrying over it well into their subsequent releases.

I agree is not as bad as it looks. But it's still not innocent. I've read many times producers and engineers, especially those working on re-masters, addressing the issue and pretty much condemning the wild use of compression. Remasters are louder than the originals by default but other things are done to them too.
I think a lot depends on the type of music and arrangements. I think with PJ's "sound" producers should go easier with it because their studio tracks tend to sound too saturated with all those guitars and even the vocals got buried under them.
Many people notice it even without knowing much about it. I think most agree that s/t is just not produced well. I remember we were talking about it in the Severed Hand thread.
I've made some screen shots:
Come Back:

This is a ballad. The intro should be quieter. The song really suffers from this treatment.
Severed Hand

This kind of layered arrangements really love space which lucks here. It gives it a low-fi feel that doesn't work with this kind of arrangements.
Hard Sun

This is different. It looks blocked at the end but it's not as bad as it looks. Eddie's voice and Corine's too sounds much better and it doesn't get buried under the layered guitars towards the end.

Thanks for those wavs. It's interesting to see Comeback look like that, it definitely could use some more subtlety in the opening. As for Hard Sun, I kinda of disagree about the vocals as I feel they get totally lost at the end of the track but somehow it works well. They repeat over and over so much that it becomes almost like a fade-out.

Ultimately it's now a catch-22. As an artist you want to sound dynamic but if you don't play the compression-game you won't stand up to the other songs on the radio. When my band went to master our first EP back in 2001 the engineer asked us to bring in a CD we wanted to match the dynamics. We brought him No Code because we felt it matched our style and dynamics and mix. However, if you're making typical modern alt-rock like System of the Down or Three Days Grace, you'd have to go with that same type of mastering. It's a viscious circle until technology progresses or one artists swoops in by storm with a new sound.

I know. But it works like an industry imposed taste. This has been going on for the last 10 years which is a relatively short time. It should be music dependent rather than default.