Taking advantage of the trend towards listening to music from the digital "cloud"—via services like Pandora, Spotify, and Apple's forthcoming iCloud—the proposal would institute a volume limit on any songs downloaded from the cloud, effectively removing the strategic advantage of loudness. "Once a piece of music is ingested into this system, there is no longer any value in trying to make a recording louder just to stand out," said legendary engineer Bob Ludwig, who has been working with Lund, in an email. "There will be nothing to gain from a musical point of view. Louder will no longer be better!"

But while the proposal has seen some success in the EU, it seems unlikely that audiophiles could rely on the US government to take a similar stand, in large part because it isn't a matter of public concern. "I don't see it happening," wrote Greg Milner, author of Perfecting Sound Forever: The Aural History of Recorded Music, in an email. "I think the general increase in awareness regarding the issue is more than counter-balanced by the fact that, by and large, nobody (in a sweeping, generalized sense) cares about music sounding 'good' in some sort of rarefied way. It's more important that it be heard above the noise of everyday life, since we hear so much of our music on the go."

Tom Coyne, a mastering engineer at Sterling Sound who has most recently worked on Adele's 21, Beyoncé's I Am....Sasha Fierce, and Britney Spears' Femme Fatale, also saw little push-back to loudness on the part of the industry. For labels, he said, "It's always louder," adding, "it should be something the public's concerned about, but I don't think it is."

Despite this, many say that the tide seems to have turned. "In the past year I have had more requests for the final mastering to be dynamic than I have in a long time," said Ludwig. "This has been very encouraging as before the only instruction was to 'make it hot'"—which is to say, loud. Milner has observed a similar phenomenon, and said that "mastering engineers have eased off the hyper-compression." While the industry might not be taking concerns about loudness into account terribly much—even Ludwig notes that "not much has changed in the best-practices department"—the race to the noisy top seems to have stopped, and maybe even turned back. A recent article in Mix Magazine even declared that "the Loudness War is over."

What might have caused this reversal of fortune? Experts say that while record companies and the public are still part of the problem, all the media attention last decade to loudness may have made artists more aware of the destructive effects of dynamic compression. And though labels and fans may have a say in how music sounds, the ultimate decision is still the musician's. Metallica, for instance, wasn't in need of any competitive advantage when they pushed Death Magnetic into the red; they just liked how it sounded. "It was the artist's choice to make it that level," Coyne points out. "If you don't like it, don't buy it. But don't tell them what they can or can't do. It's the sound they wanted—you can't fault them for that."