Dynamic range, and the lack of it in modern recordings, has been brought to my attention a number of time recently.  I used to hate albums with huge dynamic range—-those Beethoven symphonies and such—-but this was just because I would like to listen to my music fairly loud, but didn’t want to shake the house for the bass hits.  These days though, having a little less bass around, I actually want more dynamic range, and can really tell when an album is mastered in such a flat way.  Slashdot points to an IEEE Spectrum article on the issue.