In other words, whut Mr. Milner said.

One often-given reason why is the iTunes shop. That’s the place where most music gets sold nowadays. (Related issue: not so much the sound of iPods as of cheap headphones - which are all the same. Literally: http://gizmodo.com/5617200/the-secret-scam-of-cheap-earbuds )

There’s also another concern with classical music - that it’s cheaper for labels to reissue an old recording than make a new one, and the old ones sell just about as well if not better. The portion of the industry given to classical is pretty minuscule. I mean… *dramatically* small: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/29/AR2010012904193.html .

Excerpt:

SoundScan, the company that provides sales data to Billboard, says it cannot officially release exact sales figures to journalists. Instead, all numbers are rounded to the nearest 1,000, so sales of 501 copies are reported as 1,000, and anything less than 500 is “under 1,000.” On last week’s traditional classical chart, only the top two recordings managed to sell “1,000″ copies. Every other recording (including, in its second week, Hahn’s) sold “under 1,000.” The official total sales of the top 25 titles amounted to 5,000 copies, an average of 200 units a recording (sorry, “under 1,000″). And yes, that includes downloads.

A leaked copy of the SoundScan figures for a single week from the fall tells an equally sad tale. In early October, pianist Murray Perahia’s much-praised album of Bach partitas was in its sixth week on the list, holding strong at No. 10. It sold 189 copies. No. 25, the debut of the young violinist Caroline Goulding, in its third week, sold 75 copies.

You are correct, that was one of the key selling points of CD’s. And it was also had the advantage of being true, unlike some of the other claims about CD’s. CD’s can definitely handle a greater dynamic range than vinyl or magnetic tape. The irony of how things have developed is that records made today typically have a smaller dynamic range than those made in the pre-digital era. In fact, since 16-bit CD technology is based on taking samples that reflect dynamic range (a huge over-simplification, but true enough), most recordings today wouldn’t even require all 16 bits to express the full range. In very real terms, we are not using the technology to the fullest.

As for the question of genres, I can tell you that mastering engineers I interviewed for the book claimed that the practice of massive compression had infiltrated all genres, including jazz and classical recordings. I’m not sure how widespread it is in those genres, though.

…[Dance Yrself Clean] starts so quiet before kicking in. …but the impact was so much stronger on vinyl. The dynamic shift is like stepping into full color. It made me think about how people expect everything on albums to be an equal level of loudness now

…makes me horribly sad, because I remember when CDs were first introduced, the ability to handle extreme dynamic ranges was a key selling feature! With digital recording, the softest passages could be perfectly clear, with no tape hiss, and the loudest crescendo would be free of distortion or clipping. To hear that vinyl mastering is beating CD at the very game that CDs were designed to play is just depressing to me. It’s such an abuse of the digital technology.

That being said: most of the talk about the “loudness wars” and how digital is ruining the listening experience are overwhelmingly focused on pop and rock, whereas the CD format was really optimized for orchestral music, which naturally has a much wider dynamic range. I find myself wondering if recent classical and jazz recordings are getting squashed and flattened in the same way. Somebody well-acquainted with both the pop and classical worlds ought to investigate… paging Alex Ross?