Why do mass marketed CD's sound so crappy?

Birdwizard is right on. In our audio society we went to a recording studio where we heard a local artist do up a first shot at a song he'd just composed, and got to see the various tricks they could perform with the pro tools software in the studio. A few months later the guys from the studio came to one of our meetings at my home with a CD on which was the original cut of that song we heard, the rough cut with the full rock band in the studio and the version they were presenting to the record companies to sell the band. The rough cut sounded great--dynamic as hell, clean, ideal for an audiophile's system. The cut the record company was getting was compressed dynamically and nowhere near as good sounding as the rough cut. But it is what is needed to make the song sound good on a radio station (tough to hear the really quiet parts over the road and wind noise in a car) and to sell the record and the artist to the big labels. Don't necessarily blame the artist, it's not their call for the most part.

Hammergjh: Yeah, they heard the difference; they could also easily hear the difference between the 24/96 master tape we got to hear in the control room and the 16/44.1 CD they mixed down from that tape. But they're really not the record producers in this case, they produced a demo CD for this artist in order to sell the artist to a major recording label, so they did what they had to do to get the attention of the major labels. No shame there. And I guess the major labels want what sells, what will sound good on a car radio, not what will sound good on a high end system because we're unfortunately not the market they're worried about. I'd love it if the companies would release two versions of a disc, a compressed one for the radio stations to play and an uncompressed one we could buy, but there I go dreaming again!

Sean's final point brings to mind the story, I believe true, of a record producer from the 60s who reputedly did the final mix of the records he produced over the telephone, because he was listening through the same speaker you would have in the then prevalent transistor radio. He figured it had to sound good over that medium to sell, and he was right.