I'm not really interested in any compression. I listen to my music loud enough to where I can hear the quiet stuff without additional amplification..

That's OK for you. You drive a Lexus SC-400, one of the quietest cars on the planet with a kick-butt 5-channel amp playing hip-hop and heavy metal tunes totally lacking in quiet parts.1/2 When I'm screaming along in my Carrera at 6000 rpm with the targa top in the boot, picking bugs outta my teeth while playing the second movement of Beethoven's 9th, I could use a little compression!

Compression is distorting the sound. If it were such good thing, it would already be done for us when we got the CD..

Waitamminit! If done right, amplitude compression is non-distortive. I've never built a compressor, but I imagine the trick is to have the time constant longer than half the period of the deepest bass (25 ms, for 20Hz) and shorter than you'd notice a gradual change in volume (several 100 ms). Probably most important is that you can adjust the dBout/dBin ratio to suit your background noise. Ideally you'd just tell it how soft is too soft, and it would compress less when you have it cranked up (soft passages are still audible) and more when you're playing softly (soft passages would be otherwise inaudible). If you had a Carrera you might even want to factor in engine and road speed. The reason they don't compress CDs more than they do, is they don't know how much volume or background noise your going to have.

-jim <MkII:080000260 18G blue>