Death Prophetic – the end of the loudness war?

September was a bit of a quiet month in terms of website updates, but lots has been happening behind the scenes. Despite some holidays and a fair amount of day-job strife, the four of us managed to make some good progress with new song ideas at rehearsals, which has been really enjoyable (the working titles of 'Soundgarden' and 'Joy Division' give a clue as to what we think they sound like...).
The month also brought a new Metallica album, 'Death Magnetic'. I learned to play the guitar to their first five albums, but upon getting 'Load' in the mid-90s, promptly gave up on them, for what I thought was for good. Until now! This album really did surprise me, and seems to be a real return to form. What makes the release even more interesting, though, is the debate that is currently raging about its production. There seems to be a large number of disgruntled customers who think the quality of the audio on the CD release has been compromised in favour of sheer volume. I could hear the digital distortion that everyone is talking about when I first listened to the album, but figured this was an artefact present in the mp3 download.
Having yet to hear a CD copy, if the distortion is as bad as it is on mp3, then I wonder if this will finally signal an end to the ‘loudness war' that have been raging in CD mastering houses for about 15 years (where the volume of releases has been gradually increasing - to the extreme whereby sound quality begins to suffer as a result of distortion and a loss of dynamics). Having been through the mastering process most recently for 'Evacuate', this is of real interest. It was amazing quite how much we had to elevate the volume level in order to compete with other releases, and there certainly is a fine line between getting the music ‘loud enough' (whatever that means... surely listeners aren't so lazy that they won't adjust the volume knob on their hi-fis if needed) and completely trashing all your hard work.
You can read more about the loudness war here... if you want to hear the effect it's had, compare a CD album from the early '90s with one released after ‘(What's the Story) Morning Glory?'. Then put on the new Metallica CD and tell me things haven't gone too far!