Well, I prefer the more contemporary classical music, and even more so, film and TV scores. I don’t like excessive compression and limiting like the infamous “volume wars” of the late '90s and 2000s, but to be honest, I hate excessive dynamic range, and that goes for music as well as movies. For example, I hate the way Nolan mixes his movies. I was watching Interstellar the other day, and I have a home theater setup (with no dedicated home theater room, just the gear), and he sets the dialog so low that you have to raise the volume, but if you leave it at that volume, you can’t watch the whole movie like that. There will come a loud part all of a sudden that will make your ears ring, and if your speakers are not the highest quality, it will blow the tweeters in some of them. I had these Energy speakers that served me well for about ten years, and there was a scene in “The Dark Knight” that blew the tweeter in the center channel speaker.
Same goes for classical music, some of which I love, some of which bores me, and some of which is terrible, but I’m not a fan of that dynamic range that goes from very soft to very loud all of a sudden. If it’s gradual, say like Ravel’s “Bolero”, that’s one thing, but unfortunately, we can’t always listen to classical music in a room completely isolated from the rest of the world. People who live in apartments would get really angry neighbors, and people who live in houses, it depends on how close said houses are in their area. But even inside one’s home, there might be other people that are annoyed by that dynamic range.
What I mean is, my taste for that is somewhere between the full dynamic range of classical music and the excess of the volume wars. To me, the best examples of perfect orchestral music are Michael Giacchino’s “Jupiter Ascending” and all the “Battlestar Galactica” scores by Bear McCreary. Whoever was behind every aspect of sound quality in those albums to me is the very best the industry has to offer.