Loudness wars & CDs pressed in SA

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Damnit I'm getting old, but anyhow...between 86-97 I bought the bulk of my CD collection and I was often frustrated that local pressings seemed to sound quiet/ dull compared with the import pressings of an album.  As imported pressings weren't necessarily available about 50% of my collection comprised local pressings.  Roll forward to today and all those CDs are FLAC encoded and stored on a NAS acting as a dedicated music server.  Anyhow, last night a friend and I enjoyed an extended tour through our collective musical memory facilitated by Messers Regal, Sapphire & Klipdrift.  We got to playing some really old stuff (by today's terms) and finished off the evening morning  :'( marveling at just how good Gary Moore & Phil Lynott were back in the day (The Messiah Will Come Again, The Loner, Military Man, Friday On My Mind, Parisienne Walkways, Still in Love With You, The Sun Goes Down etc, etc.).  It occurred to me that a lot of what we were listening to had been ripped from the local pressings and they sounded great, in fact a hell of a lot better than most of today's pressings (local or otherwise).  From a loudness perspective I found myself turning the volume dial up a full 25% higher than I'm generally able to with today's pressings - in fact, listening to today's pressings at that volume setting on my ATC's would be physically painful.

So, I'm wondering now, were the local pressings in fact better than the imports of the time or is it just that today's pressings are so compressed that the old stuff sounds great by comparison?
 
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