Acclaimed producer J Robbins has posted a lengthy and comprehensive rant about the current state of music mastering on his website. Specifically, citing the the tendency of many engineers to produce music louder in attempt to push the effect as higher quality.

I'm not saying it's wrong to want your record to leap out of the speakers; far from it. But I am saying by playing into "the loudness wars" you are allowing people you've never met - the prime movers of the highly expoitative mainstream music industry, who are deeply invested in the logic of dick-size comparison - to define what "leaping out of the speakers" means, and often to the detriment of your music and the degradation of the hard work you and your colleagues have put into it.

You can check it out here. We've seen the issue of over-compression and the "loudness wars" discussed recently in a campaign launched by Britain's leading studio engineers.