loudness wars: digital recording to improve?

Mapman, you might want to reconsider your thoughts on what algorithms can and can't do, especially when given more brushes and more delicate brushes on a bigger canvas. Getting it right the first time is certainly preferable, but being able to offer some level of repair might be better than leaving it broken. I suspect that the potentiality of these kind of offerings, might more often than not, be squashed by business politics rather than inherent failure.

Unsound,

Most likely the results of applying corrective algorithms should be better, but not likely as effective as fixing this data quality issue at the source.

Audiophiles tend to care about these kinds of details more than most which is why I am skeptical of the benefit to that cranky bunch.

Heck, a lot of audiophiles will never accept digital even if done right, much less if botched and corrected somewhat after the fact.

Remember, CD's have been exposed to error correction since it's inception.

"exposed to error correction"?

I don't understand that statement. In any case, compression is an entirely different - and *relatively* new - thing (at least to the degree that it is used these days).

Again the role of error correction is misunderstood.

Error correction is not a band aid to fix undesired screwups. It is a method of handling an expected rate of errors resulting from operating the hardware at a much higher bandwidth than it could handle without errors. As long as the error rate does not exceed that for which the algorithm is designed the output data will be exactly the same whether errors occur or not, and, incidently, will be identical to the original data before it was encoded for error correction. It is not simple interpolation of adjacent data, although that may be done as a fall-back if the error rate is excessive. Not the greatest, but better than aborting the playback.