Yeah that is emasculating, for lack of a better word, when the place is jamming and your disk rolls up and is perceived as weak by comparison.
Any more emasculating that when your disc rolls up and sounds awful because it's been pushed as flat as a commercial mix in order to try and "compete"?
Volume does not help one "compete". It's the music that counts. If your stuff is worth listening to, people won't care if it's 3dB quieter. If it's not worth listening to, kicking up the volume by 3dB isn't going to change anybody's mind.
Of course there's always another answer: Stop trying to fool everybody by sticking you song in the middle of a commercial playlist. Keep your homebrew playlists and your commercial playlists separate.
it makes me wonder why virtually every cd out there is pressed so hot still.
Because there are two classes of people making those decisions: The first are the label suits who just don't know any better and think that mo louda automatically means mo betta. Remember these are the same braniacs who thought it was a good idea to make those annoying over-modulated TV and radio commercials louder than the TV or radio show. How many times have you felt like shooting your TV or radio whenver that happened?
The second class are the fine but misinformed folks exactly like you who, when they do get their break, go to the engineer and say the exact same things your saying because that's the wiki-myth that you guys just keep perpetuating on the Internet. The engineers more often than not just shut up and collect their paycheck by doing what you ask, and then one day go home after leaving the studio, take a stiff drink of Chevas, and calmly put bullet in their head.
Consider this: The Loudness Wars began sometime around 1990. Which is about the same time that CD sales started to decline (4 years before the Internet and 9 years before Napster - so don't blame pirating for the decline.)
Sure there are a few good logistical reasons that assist this, but without a doubt, the fact that recorded music just hasn't sounded as good, even if only on a subliminal level to the average consumer, is the main bad seed precipitating the decline in sales. If people thought todays mixes were worth listening to for more than a couple of days, they'd buy 'em.
I mention a "couple of days" because there is a definite fatigue factor with smashed mixes. You tell me; your average song today stays on your primary playlist for how long before you get tired of it? Or if you're on a long road trip, how long before you gotta turn it off and have some silence for a while? Both are natural occurances, but both happen faster to squashed mixes than they do to ones that actually sound good. You want your songs to have staying power beyond that lame party you were at? Keep at least a couple of dB of dynamics.
G.