mattplaysguitar
"It's known as The Loudness War.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war"
 
Very interesting link!
Funny, they mentioned the album from my first post as being criticized for its sound quality haha.

I've been burning CD comps again - vinyl, older CDs, modern downloads.  Unless I spend a lot of time trying to match volumes the songs are all over the place, volume-wise.  Right now I've got a PJ Harvey song following a capture of Riders on the storm which matched pretty good (old CD and album version).  Before that was modern Black Angels song - but they don't overmaster.  Still had to pull down the volume some.

The easiest way to match sources is to use the volume knob.  I know, it is so primitive.  But works.  And takes less time than "remastering" songs that already sounded good natively.

@

wavelab has a great automatic function to equal 'level' of disparate tracks

batch meta normalizer