agree with goingincirclez. even if you end up preferring the standard version to the audiophile version, you have the added option of doing an A/B comparison between the mixes - not to determine which is better, but to recognize more details in the recording. from the description, it should be more significant than messing with your speakers and EQ, but less so than hearing the separate tracks in a multitrack release.
Originally Posted by
Tortfeazor
Not trying to be a dick, and I may even be wrong, but I don't think this is entirely correct. The "loud" version isn't going to have any frequencies that the "audiophile" version has as I think you're suggesting. The increased dynamic range means there's more of a range of volume compared to the "loud version", hence adding more subtlety to dynamic changes. But the "loud" version isn't clipping frequencies.
I'm certainly not an expert here, but I don't think decreasing the dynamic range removes any information, but merely shrinks the difference between soft and loud.
i'm not sure the post this is responding says that information is lost with one mix or the other or anything about clipping frequencies (which doesn't even make sense?), but the issue is more about perception than what exactly is in the mix. in any mix, some sounds in the recording will mask others (so you can't hear them), as will background noise, and decreased dynamic range can mean less "information" in the sense that you can't differentiate between the loudness of one sound and another that is slightly louder/quieter.
(i'm not a recording engineer expert either, though. an engineer specializing in audio, but that's different.)