dynamic range -the good and bad?

Dynamic range is GOOD.

The death of dynamic range on modern recordings has made audiophiles an endangered species...

Glowplug, the "scratchiness" you're hearing is likely the analog tape hiss. Comes with the territory on well-remastered analog recordings. As does dynamic range with classical recordings--while there might be some slight compression and gain-riding done by some labels, it is nothing like what you'll hear in pop music recordings, which are often compressed to better be heard on a car radio rather on a killer stereo rig.

There may be more going on than just the recording. Some equipment, mostly speakers, do not produce dynamics in a linear fashion to the input level, so that the speaker may not respond in the same proportion to a small signal at a given frequency than 1), it may respond to a larger signal at the same frequency or 2), and more commonly, at another frequency. For instance, if a speaker is voiced to boom and sizzle, the mids may be recessed making a solo harder to hear but when the orchestra kicks in the high and low frequencies overwhelm. The better the speakers, the easier to hear through the entire performance at various volume levels even when the overall dynamics actually improve. Here’s a review that touches on this point. Just one more thing that makes this hobby so fascinating.

http://www.sonoris.co.kr/review/reviews/tas/exoticaGR_part1.pdf

Pacific_island_audio...I question your suggestion that no classical recordings are compressed, although I agree that, unlike pop music, it is subtle.

A manual form of compression called "gain riding" is surely done, and when multiple microphone signals are mixed some gain adjustments are made. One practice which bothers me is to boost a soloist to unreal volume. If I turn my volume up so that the orchestra sounds right the soloist is louder than a real instrument can play.

If I turn my volume up so that the orchestra sounds right the soloist is louder than a real instrument can play.

That is my experience too. It is one of the reasons recorded music sounds like recorded music and not live music. I like Telarc because they tend not to over emphasize the lead instruments as much as some "audiophile" labels do.