Looks like this was released in 2006 at the height of the 'loudness wars'. Discogs credit Mike Marsh as remix engineer for CD1.
I found this from a 2012 interview with him on an Oasis fan site:
What do you think of the so-called ‘loudness wars’? Do you think mastering engineers are now under pressure to push levels further than they would like? If so, where do you think the pressure comes from and what do you think might be done to change this situation (if indeed you feel it is a problem in need of a solution)?
This is a topic we could all write an encyclopaedia on! Mastering engineers have always been under pressure to push levels since back in the day when we were just cutting records! When a vinyl single was the only way your record got heard. Who could cut the loudest record? Who could make your 12-inch or 7-inch single stand out from the last one played? So this is nothing really new! And then along came digital and eventually the arrival of digital limiters and the landscape was changed forever.
I guess I come from the old-skool. An engineer who understands headroom, dynamic range and the beauty of that verse / chorus build thing. Well, that barely exists now! We are definitely under more pressure now than ever before to push things to the max, although there is a bit of a turnaround in the conscience of people who are realising that, actually, it’s all been getting a bit too painful listening to this saturated blob of audio.
Of course it depends on what kind of music it is and what kind of music you are working on. Dance Music and electronic music is still pushed very hard but there is certainly a bit more give and take when it comes to “band tracks” and singer / songwriter stuff with regard to putting some dynamics back into the process!
Initially the pressure to push levels harder came from record company A&R Departments, Artists and Producers who just wanted their record to sound louder than anything else on the planet.
Then they wanted it louder than that.
Digital limiters and DAW plug-ins arrived which then allowed volumes and dynamic range to be squashed even further at the recording and mixing process – way before it even reaches mastering for its final level placement. Artists and Engineers then got used to hearing everything they were working on in a compressed environment, so the only way they could appreciate it being better, was by it being louder. It got out of hand.
As mastering engineers, we are also providing a service to give our customers (i.e: Artists, Producers and Record Companies) exactly what they want. If you chose not to do what they wanted you lost all your clients so we were always in quite a compromising situation.
None of us mastering engineers want to mash up sound to the level of un-listenability but the big problem is that this is now becoming the “normal” way to hear music for a whole new generation of people who have grown up knowing no different. They have grown up with the “brick-wall digital limiter” effect on music, so to them, anything less than that would result in them thinking there has been some massive technical error as it sounds too quiet!
To put the situation right would mean scaring a lot of people and going back to the days of way more dynamic range and lots more headroom. Personally I would like to see some move toward that – but who’s going to be the first to put themselves up for a test? Less is often more! But for a lot of people, less would be a big gamble / mistake. The problem is we’ve created this situation and it is going to be VERY difficult to undo it.
Back in the day we used to turn our volume controls up to 7 or 8 if you wanted to play stuff loud. Now you barely reach 2 and it’s already blasting. It’s a shame because, simply, if we were ALL working at a lower level throughout the whole process and introducing more dynamic, the listener could then turn up their amp to 7 or 8 again and it would sound as loud!
The other big factor in this whole volume wars thing is the MP3 and the devices on which MP3s are played now. Few people have home hi-fi systems or audio playback systems with good speakers capable of good volume anymore. Much music is listened to on shitty devices with tiny little speakers that come nowhere near conveying the full frequency range of recorded music. Because of that and, to get the maximum volume out of the crappy playback device being used, squashing the sound to the max was considered the best way to do it.
http://www.oasis-recordinginfo.co.uk/?page_id=156
