I read this article over at eqmag.com and it was a great read. I especially like the part about brickwall limiting.

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Which brings me to my final point: STOP WITH THE BRICKWALL LIMITING! Fer Christ's sake, people. Louder CDs do not sound better! First off, a couple of things happen when you brickwall limit, starting with you change the sound of the mix. The first thing to disappear when you brickwall are certain transients, like the snare. The other thing, and I have noticed this a lot, is things tend to sound distorted when you make the CD too loud. I had a record I produced and mixed ruined on me by a mastering engineer who insisted on using brickwall limiting. I got a copy of the CD, and was mortified when I heard the distortion. I thought perhaps I had screwed the pooch during mixing and took out the half inch tapes to check. Sure enough, the mixes were fine and didn't contain the distortion, and it wound up being a result of printing a CD too goddamn loud with brickwall limiting, even though the peaks were still at 0dB. CD players just are not built to accommodate that type of headroom. We have a lot of CDs coming out these days, by major artists even, that sound like crap, because some A&R idiot decided that the louder mastering job was the better one. Bands fall prey to this mentality too, and it's really a mindset that needs to stop, because it's ruining a lot of music. Dynamics are part of music. Brickwalling kills dynamics, and is the refuge of untalented mastering engineers. Stop the madness already, or I'll have to hurt the next person who says to their mastering engineer, "I want this to be really loud.""