this is all sooooo true. the mastering on so many more tracks is awful. and the mp3 revolution is just not helping. at least with vinyl, you send your tracks down to be cut and anything you haven't sorted gets sorted out nice by a bloke who knows what the hell he's doing. mastering is an artform, i've read books upon books on the subject and it'snot something that you can pick up overnight. the problem is people with all this cracked and freely available software is people think you can just pile on the limiting and that's it. distort the shit out of it and whooopie it's PHAT. well sorry to piss on your fire but it isnt.

add onto that the fact that the quality control is going out of the market and you're screwed.

there is good stuff out there but there's 20000000 millions time more shit than there ever was.

it will change for sure, but until then happy hunting - you're gonna be searching a hell of a long time! :)