Soundhound,

Precisely. Pyschoacoustics rears its ugly head: louder sounds "better" to even the most informed listener. But that doesn't speak of the superiority of the format: you could always equally goose up the levels of DD if you wanted and once more level the playing field.

But what would be the result? You'd get the same kind of volume escalation you get with radio stations, and the same resulting compression of the signal to achieve it.

I think DD's got the right approach: try to stay as accurate as possible while achieving reasonable compression. Now obviously, something with no data loss like MLP is superior, but in terms of design philosophy, at least Dolby Labs had the right idea.

Jeff