That's not just my opinion. Daptone Records founder Gabe Roth said, "You used to have people together in a room playing a song; now they make records that try to sound like people together playing a song." Drummer/producer Steve Jordan is very much aware of the problem that plagues so many contemporary recordings, and he said, "When you're spending too much time 'perfecting' the music, you're probably going to lose the feel. Human beings' heart rates aren't steady, they go up and down, but that's exactly what's being extracted from a lot of today's music."

Sony isn't a company I normally associate with high-end audio, but it will be at the show demonstrating its award-winning SS-AR1 speaker. VPI turntables will be giving away a Scout turntable worth $1,800, with a handmade Soundsmith phono cartridge. Local dealers Audio Doctor, Sound by Singer, and Innovative Audio/Video will be on hand and they are promising lots of new gear presentations.

The Loudness Wars refers to mixing and mastering techniques that squash music's natural soft-to-loud dynamics. Obviously, you can control the playback volume of your tunes, but once the engineers compress the sound, there's no way to restore the true dynamic range. This problem doesn't just affect obscure records; Grammy Award-winning CDs, like Arcade Fire's "The Suburbs" suffer from loud-all-the-time compression. I love their music, but I find "The Suburbs" hard to listen to. Before we go any further, I'm not referring to MP3 "lossy compression," that's a completely different malady. If you listen to downloaded or streaming music, chances are you're getting the worst sonic effects of dynamic and lossy compression!

That's sad news indeed, but Katz was on that AES panel and he discussed a possible Loudness Wars cease-fire that would involve the widespread adaptation of an automatic volume adjustment technique known as normalization (Apple's Sound Check is such a system). This currently in use process isn't perfect, but Katz expressed the hope that future processors will be better. These normalizing algorithms don't merely squash/compress music's dynamic range, no, they're more sophisticated than that and process long-term dynamic attributes. Katz expressed the hope that when these normalization techniques are perfected, highly dynamic music will be able to coexist with heavily compressed recordings in your music player. The dynamic recordings won't sound too "quiet" when played in shuffle modes, side-by-side with heavily compressed tunes. When truly sophisticated normalization becomes a reality, record producers will be less inclined to overcompress the music. At least there's some hope the record companies will back off on overcompression in a few years.

Collaborative research led by geologists at Trinity College Dublin has found strong evidence that one of the largest preserved impact structures on Earth was caused by a comet colliding with our planet over 1.8 billion years ago.

By conducting geochemical analyses of the siderophile (iron-loving) elements found in and around the crater fill - and by modelling the impact with computer software - the geologists showed that whatever crashed to Earth was almost completely vaporised on entry.

Professor of Geology and Mineralogy in the School of Natural Sciences at Trinity, Balz Kamber, said: 'Our findings provide further evidence that some very large terrestrial impact basins were created by comets, which is important and interesting in the context of the early bombardment of our inner Solar System - it might well be that comets were responsible for bringing volatile elements to the young Earth.'

So the question is: has music become too perfect, and lost its way? Lord knows I'm not talking about the sound (quality) of music. It generally sounds like crap, and it's overly compressed, equalized, and processed. Computer editing systems scrub every last bit of humanity out of the music, so all that's left is glistening perfection, which has little to do with the way the band played in the first place.

In the days before a computer ever graced a studio, great recordings were regularly made in a day or two. Bob Dylan's earliest albums, the first Beatles, and hundreds of now classic Blue Note jazz albums were all knocked out in less than a day. A record might be recorded, mixed, mastered, and released in a week. That was possible because in those days engineers captured complete performances; most of today's pop/rock music is assembled out of fragments of highly processed sound. The robotic, mechanical, stereo truth - Suggested Resource site, purely synthetic perfection can take weeks or months to accomplish. I thought computers were supposed to streamline creativity, not slow it down.

So sure, most of the new music you listen to right now is crippled by overcompression, but that's not a big problem when you're listening over inexpensive earbuds or computer speakers. You're in effect sheltering your ears from the compression onslaught. I've tried to explain the Loudness Wars with words, but it's a lot easier to understand the problem with images and sound. This video should help clarify the concept.