I just want to clarify some things:
I'm not voting for mandatory inclusion of waveform snapshots when submitting albums, this would be a bit too much.
However if someone already has done some analysis of the tracks and he has proof that the mastering is bad (in the examples above it sticks out a mile), why not include this data? Especially when two different releases are available I think this is some very neat info. Of course we should like two or three articles on the topic, so the newcomer can understand why mastering matters and why the loudness war destroys music.
Next some facts:
1) VBR V0 encoding with a recent LAME version isn't ABXable from the lossless source, except for some test samples that are used to check the encoder implementation. So talking about lossless vs. lossy compression in this context (it's about 'dynamic range compression', and NOT data compression) is nonsense and anyone who does it, is missing the point.
2) You don't have to be an 'audiophile' (and please give me a definition of this term) to spot clipping and dynamic range compression. There are some very nice examples on the problem on Youtube, with showing the waveform and playing it back (just search for 'loudness war'). Youtube's media containers probably use something like AAC (with low bitrate) to encode the audio, so this _is_ lossy compression of the audio part.
And even then you can see and hear the (bad) effect that dynamic range compression has on the original waveform. You don't need a hifi setup, even crappy laptop speakers are able to reveal the difference between 'compressed' and 'uncompressed'.
3) You don't need hifi equipment to spot the difference. I can hear clipping even on my portable player with some cheap Sony in-ears.
I'm amazed how many people here just put this loudness war problem in the audiophile corner and don't care at all about the music that might be good in principle, but ends up in a heavily distorted version on the disc. How is this acceptable?! How can we just ignore the problem, when we're all here because we love music?
@Teioh: I did this a lot in the past. Used to buy a lot of movie scores from Varese Sarabande back then and there were more and more releases that compressed the source to sound louder. I filed a lot of complaints on the problem, but never got any replies. Eventually I stopped buying VS releases.
And now I only buy something from them once in a while (and only after making sure that the mastering isn't that bad). Now my point is, if more people were aware of the problem, then the record companies would have to start rethinking the whole mastering.
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