The car is one, but I would have thought the iPod was the obvious example (and other portable music players, of course).
People use them to listen to music in noisy environments with bud-style headphones. If the dynamic range is too high, you simply can't hear anything too quiet in the mix. And if you do turn it up, you'll be deafened when the loud part kicks in. I consider myself a bit of an audio nut but even I choose "hot" mixes when I'm sitting on the train.
Not sure what the solution is other than providing two mixes of each track. Perhaps a feature for future media formats.
It shouldn't be too difficult for such players to analyze the range of a track in advance and compress it appropriately in real time, perhaps to a user-specified degree.
1. Chicken and egg: Until such a feature is ubiquitous, labels can't rely on its presence, and won't release in a suitable format. Until there is demand, player manufacturers won't include it. And I don't see much independent consumer demand.
2. There is no one algorithm or processing technique which will give optimal results for all inputs. The process is still an art requiring a lot of skill and, well, taste. Mastering is still a real necessity. There's crude automated compression, sure, but for the real end product I don't think anyone wants that.
3. The sound is already mixed at the consumer end. For successful remastering (which is basically what you're doing on the fly) the separate tracks would be needed. For example, in an otherwise uncompressed track, a distorted electric guitar is pretty much naturally compressed. Drums are the opposite. Naively just compressing the whole thing will keep the guitar and lose the drums. I'm really oversimplifying here but hopefully you get the picture.
I do think such an approach could work, but you'd need to supply the mixable tracks, or relevant groups of them at least, and then supply mixing/compression instructions to the player. If the instructions were standardised with fairly predictable and consistent results, that could be a way to implement such a scheme.
People use them to listen to music in noisy environments with bud-style headphones. If the dynamic range is too high, you simply can't hear anything too quiet in the mix. And if you do turn it up, you'll be deafened when the loud part kicks in. I consider myself a bit of an audio nut but even I choose "hot" mixes when I'm sitting on the train.
Not sure what the solution is other than providing two mixes of each track. Perhaps a feature for future media formats.