... thoughts on Taylor Swift's REPUTATION CD...

Reputation is state of the art modern pop production.  Complaining about DR and compression in modern pop is like complaining that rock and roll has too much drumming--it comes with the territory and to varying degrees always has.  We love it, particularly through the PMC monitors we use for recording.  Of course, we also love the older Taylor Swift albums too--and those had plenty of compression as well.  The common denominator is that they are all very well done.

Sure.  They're PMC twotwo.6's.  The brand was recommended to me by Glenn Meadows, a well-known mastering engineer in Nashville who mastered my daughter, Merritt Gibson's first album on some enormous PMCs in his studio. (Played me some Steely Dan, of course;  he mastered some of their compilations.)  I first heard the twotwo's at VintageKing in Nashville, where they played me some tracks from Beck's Morning Phase album, and that remains a favorite.  Since the purpose of monitors is essentially to bring everything right up front and let you hear every part of the mix, anything with a lot going on is fun to hear on good monitors.  Since this is a Taylor Swift oriented chain, I'll mention an older track, All Too Well, from her Red album.  In addition to being one of her best songs, it's really fun to listen to the electric guitar on the left channel on the PMC's.  You feel like your standing next to the guitar player in the tracking room.  It sounds like it was recorded in one take, and knowing how good the session players in Nashville are, it probably was.  The twotwo's are pretty pricey for small near field monitors, but PMC has a new model out, the Result 6, I think, that's a a lower price point and has been getting good reviews in the pro audio community (e.g., recent Sound on Sound review).

Unless she was playing in your living room, I'm pretty sure you've actually never heard Taylor Swift's voice without some degree of compression.  It's on all of her albums and live performances.  For example, if you go on YouTube, you'll find a wonderful live solo performance she did of her song "Wildest Dreams" before a small audience at the Grammies, just her and a Fender Jaguar.  It sounds great and natural, but it's loaded with compression and plate-type reverb, which has a similar sustaining effect as compression.  You may not notice it, and that's a sign that it's well done, but it's all there.  In fact, as I think about it, you may have noticed it more on the the Red album than on Reputation, because Red is not as completely synth based as Reputation, so  the vocal compression may stand out a little more.  One of the interesting things about current synth based, beats oriented music is that it is not intended to sound "real" or like anything other than what it is.  So concepts like compression and DR reduction are pretty meaningless, Because, compared to what  . . . ?

It may have all started out a a radio volume thing, but now it is just the sound of modern pop music.  And it can, and often is, overdone, for example with many current country music releases, which are so compressed they sound like they were squeezed out of a tube.  But it is always there.  So much so that I would have to disagree with the previous poster who said there is nothing inherent in the music that requires it.  As a factual matter, there is.  The classic rock and pop recordings from the 1960's onward were all recorded through microphones, guitar amps, mixing decks and tape recorders that each furnished their own degrees and flavors of compression and saturation.  They were also run through compressors and limiters like the UA 1176, Teletronix LA-2 and Fairchild, among others.  All of those same devices (or more often  digital emulations) are still used today.  Sometimes it's not used well and it doesn't always sound so great through the fancy equipment owned by the folks on Audiogon, but from the Beatles to Taylor Swift, it's the sound of pop and rock.