Is this clipping?

"The 300B amp can reach the peaks, but can't sustain them. "

That sounds like clipping to me?

Thinking more about recent digital rock recordings, seems to me that people make the mistake of associating compression and loudness with a poor recording. I disagree- they're supposed to sound that way. Unfortunately too much of the current audiophile equipment is unable to reproduce it well. This is one of the reasons we hear so much Norah Jones-type music at audiofests.
Last night I tried to listen to Katatonia-Night is The New Day on my 300b/single driver system, but simply unlistenable. Listening today through headphones- fantastic!

Psag,

I think it is a safe thing to say that it is generally harder and more expensive to get a system to sound really good when played (realistically) loud than unrealistically soft.

Louder requires more power than soft. That is pretty intuitive, right?

Well, a lot of new recordings are louder overall, so more power than ever is now required as well.

Efficiency helps. Suitable degrees of efficiency overall to deliver loud recordings without clipping can be achieved readily these days with a more efficient amp, like Class D, and/or more efficient speakers.

Psag, while that might be true for some systems, why do those recordings sound so damn bad on systems that can handle dynamic range.
They're supposed to suck?!

Here is an interesting site to find out more about dynamic range of specific recordings:

[url=http://www.dr.loudness-war.info]Dynamic Range Db[/url]

Lots of red and much less green in recent years.

Still, you can't generalize that recordings in general old or new are good or bad. It depends which ones specifically.

Any particular examples in mind Unsound that others may have also to offer an opinion on?

There is no doubt that most pop/pock recordings these days, including newer remasters of old stuff, are louder overall in general. Some are also clipped. Most are compressed to some degree. Some sound very good. Some sound more "average". Most are enjoyable to me and have at least some good qualities although many are far from perfect.

In lieu of crunching the numbers, I think a greater % of new recordings that I buy sound good than ever before. Some of that is the sysem I am playing them on these days, but that alone would not save them if there was no merit otherwise.

Then again I am a music lover and will listen to almost anything once unless it is just so noisy, distorted or poorly produced that I can't handle it. That occurs rarely.