Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The great selling point of digital music was a wider dynamic range in which the loudest and softest portions of a song no longer had to be compressed to fit the narrower range of an LP or Cassette. Unfortunately, within the last 10 years, audio engineers seem to have forgotten all of this and now turn everything up to 11. While this may work for the latest metal release (no, it actually doesn't), what this does to most material is make it sound horrible. This is no exception. I have a copy of Rhinestone Cowboy from a cheap foreign CD set, probably mastered off 2nd or 3rd generation source material. It sounds markedly better than what is on this MP3. Everything in the mix is turned up as loud as it will go to the point where the sound is distorted in the mix. This is absolutely the LAST thing you should be doing to music from this genre and era. If you've ever turned up music louder than your speakers can handle, or tried recording music at levels that are too loud, you'll get a sense of how brittle and terrible sounding 85% of this music sounds. I started buying music in the CD era, and one of my greatest joys was putting on headphones and hearing sounds I never heard on vinyl or FM radio. These days, all you hear is LOUD. I know a lot of people can't tell the difference, but trust me, this set sounds terrible, which is a shame.