... thoughts on Taylor Swift's REPUTATION CD...

Great to see others answered your questions so well.

Regarding if the music on this forum is too high brow, I would hope not. There are very few of us who don’t have recording that touch our hearts, or move our butts that are on the poor side of the loudness wars. Enjoy what you enjoy and post about what you enjoy, and take the criticism for what it is, another mans opinion.

However, It would help you understand what good sound is to listen to recordings that are well recorded, so you will know when a song is recorded well or you just enjoy it.

Remember we audiophiles care about sound and music, so have a little patience with us.

acman3: Thank you for your courtesy...

Agreed. And as a new audiophile you begin to experience this through different formats. I've ALWAYS been a music lover. As in sit down and listen to music and do nothing else for extended periods.

But in the last 10 years or so that has meant iTunes on a low end (but pretty darn good) system.

Hearing good songs that are well produced and uncompressed (from a digital file standpoint) is a revelation in itself. Hearing them on a decent system (who can define that?) is another revelation. The good part is that you get a whole new level of enjoyment.

The downside is that you can become less tolerant of less-than-hi-fi sound.

I still don't mind pop music in my car or wherever I'm in the mood for it even if it is lo-fi.

Also agree not to get bothered by other people's taste in music and how they feel about yours. Those of us who get real serious about our rock music can easily be reminded that even at its best it is relatively low brow compared to Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.

Actually the average dynamic range measure of 10 for that recording is better than average. Regardless, no one measure including dynamic range alone is a reliable indictor of whether a recording will sound good to someone or not. I’ve heard some metal recordings on the very low end of that scale like the CD release of Death Magnetic by Metallica that deliver quite well for The genre but only if the system is up to snuff and can play loud without clipping and adding distortion.

Just in my very brief experience I have found that 9 and up (on the scale used by the dr-loudness wars site) seems pretty good. Some of the albums I've cited hover around 6 or 7 and even to my untrained ears it sounds unpleasant and seems impossible to find that just right volume level.