Mastering abuse and the RMS value

I've just spend last weeks to mix a demo for a band sharing studio with I and had learn so much about mastering and general way of working to get a good sounding mix.

After having good discussion on the versionist forum and long exploring of the wikipedia, and now I understand all the debate that running around mastering.

The main problem is that during last decades worldwide producer have done a war to get the maximum loudness possible of their production. Perhaps they had think having a track louder than other studio is a proof of quality, but this war was go to far and until the majority of 'major' production was over-compressed resulting in killing all 'sensibility' of the sound !

A song from 1983

Same song remastered in 2005

So when you have a perfect mix it must not be a problem, but otherwise it's compromise between loudness/sensibility...

This loudness level are call 'root mean square' (or RMS), I'm actually compiling all information about mastering on the ODF knowledge base, so you can get more info here.