When recording sweep picking on the guitar, im torn between two styles of recording. There seems to be two debatable reasons covering this area. The first is the dynamic range. CD’s and MP3’s tend to have the dynamic range reduced heavily via compression/limiting during the mastering session which is a technique to increase the RMS. The RMS is what we perceive as the average listening volume and modern music played on radio competes to sound louder. The problem with this is the reduction in dynamic range is known to squash transient peaks and the overall sound quality suffers. “This industry debate is known as the loudness war”

When you sample the old Vinyl and Tape analogue recordings and compare the wave image (using wave lab/protools etc ) against the modern masters, you will notice the wider dynamic range and those all important transient peaks that our brains perceive as natural!! So much better and you will find the vast majority of mastering engineers agree but they are under pressure from record labels and producers to make loud masters....It’s a shame.