loudness wars: digital recording to improve?

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.

I didn't misunderstand. I was merely suggesting that things have been manipulated to sound better (or at all, for that matter) for some time. It was not meant to be an exact comparison.

In a sense everything recorded is "manipulated" in some way.

What matters I suppose is whether or not the customers like the results.