Are todays digital recordings engineered to sound best on a smartphones?

roberjerman, That might be true but I have plenty of rock and pop albums that were produced at the highest levels possible and with extraordinary DR. Mark Knopfler and Steely Dan are standouts in that respect.

I am particularly disappointed in Tedeschi Trucks since it is my understanding that they have their own studio so that they have control over the production process and still make overly compressed albums.

Even the hi-res version of the Tom Petty album I mentioned above is produced with very high DR.

I have Tedeshi Trucks live, Gary Clark Live, and I am listening to Tom petty 'Hypnotic'  right now and I will have to respectfully disagree that the recordings  I have of these three artists are bad. 

Some of us have systems that are very revealing of not so good recordings.Some of us have sensitive hearing or (me) hyperacusis(spelling?) so that overblown frequencies make us cringe.For me I can enjoy certain music on lower resolution devices but never on my rig at home"shudder!"

@gawdbless : I should have been more specific. Both the Tedeschi Trucks and Gary Clark, Jr. albums I was referring to are studio albums. Their DR has been tested and in some cases by more than one person. DR is terrible.

As far as Tom Petty, I was only referring to the CD of "The Best of Everything". But that was just based on reviews. DR testing has not been reported on the CD.

I will also say that compressed DR does not seem to bother some people, even people who seem to be picky about lots of other SQ nuances. It baffles me how though. When DR is compressed nothing in the component chain can bring it back. And when the tonal range is compressed there is ’less’ to hear in terms of tonal variation.

There are some very very experienced people here who also suggest that by room and system tweaking a low DR recording can be made to sound good. I don’t have the experience or knowledge to refute that and none of us has any basis for questioning someone else’s ears but I still don’t see how you can significantly improve something that simply is not there.

oh the loudness wars continue. But I bet a majority of pop rock rap ect is mixed for headphone listening as 75% of those targeted listeners only listen through headphones- computer - Bluetooth speakers. ( ok I'm ready for the other 25% to lambaist me here)