By the way, I am a recording engineer and have also worked a little as a producer. And I went to school to learn how to do it and my teacher was the guy who mastered all of Motown's hits from '64 to '68 after which he went to work for HDH at Hot Wax. His name is Bob Dennis. You can look him up. I was an "A" student.

Yes, they do over compress these days. Compression is normally for keeping soft and loud passages close together so that when the music gets soft, you still hear it and when it gets loud it doesn't blow your speakers. You have about a 23 dB range to work with (I was also trained on the old standard analog systems--SSL and API--and then attended more classes to learn digital recording later on). Over compressing is done so that the signals can be jacked up louder but there is also less dynamic response because the crests and troughs between the loud and soft signals are far too smooth. So everything sounds more homogenized.

And by the way, I was waiting for you to reject my source. I'll keel over and die the day someone puts forth a source for their info and it gets accepted. It will never happen at Mudcat--hasn't yet and it won't here.