A friend slipped me a copy of her upcoming album recently. I liked her songs as well as her singing. The arrangements on the album showed that some thought had been put into making each song feel unique. But the longer I listened the more I started to notice that someone had gone crazy with compression. I could hear it tugging at the vocals at the beginning of a line, and pumping away on the drum tracks. I mentioned this to someone who'd heard the music and they said, "You hear those sort of things. Normal people don't."
In Joe Boyd's book White Bicycles, in reference to the sound at a concert he was attending he notes, "Only when the sonic image is right can I relax and enjoy the music." While we all know there is no such thing as "wrong" or "right" when it comes to sound/ music/recording, we also know what we like.