Loudness war: over-compression in music

Ten minutes after you start listening to your favourite music album, you feel that something isn't right. Even though you love this album, you can't listen to it anymore. You shut it off, tired, puzzled, and confused.

This always seems to happen when you switch from a classic album to a modern one. What you've just experienced is something called over-compression of the dynamic range. Welcome to the loudness war.

The “loudness war” (an assault on music and ears - an open secret of the recording industry for nearly the past two decades), refers to the competition among record companies to make louder and louder albums. But the loudness war could be doing more than just that... like halting technological advances in sound quality for years to come. Find out how..?

Flash Version
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aug07/5480

Text version
http://spectrum.ieee.org/aug07/5429

Find out, how can Replay Gain algorithm help in this cause?