Why do mass marketed CD's sound so crappy?

Sean's final point brings to mind the story, I believe true, of a record producer from the 60s who reputedly did the final mix of the records he produced over the telephone, because he was listening through the same speaker you would have in the then prevalent transistor radio. He figured it had to sound good over that medium to sell, and he was right.

Sean...Your rant about tonal balance of recordings is exactly the reason why you need at least tone controls and perhaps an equalizer in your playback system.

Compression is not always as bad as you say. The most benign form of compression is "gain riding" (manual gain control). This causes no distortion or "smearing". The objections you raise would apply to "fast attack" compression and/or peak limiting.

I once had a dbx expander/compressor, the main use of which was to further compress recordings when I put them on tape for use in a car. Using this device I did make an interesting discovery: compression, and at the end of a recording, the fadeout, is evidently based on the common mode (A+B) signal, and this kills natural ambience which is generally differential (A-B) in the recorded signal. By compressing based on the A-B signal quite astonishing results were obtained with a matrix multichannel system. This seemed to be a bit different from the gain control logic used by the better decoders.

They are meant for your car, not your father's listening room. Or for your portable that has no capacity for stereo despite the two speakers and the word 'stereo'. They are meant for your I-pod or computer, even if no disc is present. It is not for people who are not the audience. And the audience has been shrinking, so the labels are scared and conservative. It takes time and care to make a good sounding recording at every step of the day.

By mass marketed do you mean popular, huge sales? I buy quite a few cd's, and think the majority sound at least ok. Of course I favor the more obscure, or lower selling artists like Mark Knopfler, Richard Thompson, or old jazz like Miles or Coltrane. I also have liked most of the re-mastered stuff from the 60's/70's like "Who's Next", "Tommy", Santana, Tull, ACDC, and the Doors. The worst sounding definitely are most of the artists in the current top 40. This doesn't matter to me too much as I hate most of that music anyway. I have heard some in this forum say that "Honkin for Bobo", by Aerosmith is terrible sounding. I agree it is harsh, raw sounding but sounds like almost live R n R to me which is good. The same with Clapton's "From the Cradle", or "Mr. Johnson."

Anyway, to me it sounds good if it comes closer to the live experience, live rock is raw and harsh, not warm. I do always hope for the best sound possible but that is opinion, everyone has one. Just my two cents.

I agree with Sean 100%,,,,,well put Sean!!