And the winner is: 2004 remaster. It often seems that no artist is safe from scourge of dynamic range compression in the twenty-first century, not even classic rock & roll pioneers. I have releases by Fats Domino, Jackie DeShannon, and many others in my music collection that have been subjected to this nonsense, and yet here we can see that, in some cases at least, a cooler head prevailed somewhere along the line. The later CD release of Chirping has clearly had a substantial volume boost over the earlier one, but just how much actual compression and limiting has been applied is debatable. It's very likely - to my ears at least - that the 2004 disc was taken from a different source tape compared to its 1987 predecessor. The sound is audibly clearer with more high end present, but I've struggled a bit trying to decide for sure whether this version or the earlier one is the more accurate representation of the original tapes' sound. Toward that end, I compared song selections from the two variants of the Chirping CD with their counterparts on the 1985 From the Original Master Tapes CD, which purports to have been "digitally remastered from the original Stereo and Mono first generation masters." One thing that was immediately obvious from these listening tests was that both variants of the Chirping discs sound a lot more pleasing to the ear than the 1985 compilation. The Master Tapes disc seems to have had some kind of bass enhancement and other EQ'ing applied to it, and the sound is weighted more in the right channel (this material was recorded in 1957 and the audio should be dead center, given these were all mono recordings). I then compared the same song selections with their counterparts on the 1993 Buddy Holly Collection two disc set. These results suggested that, if the 1993 collection is assumed not to have been dynamically compressed (a reasonable assumpton for 1993), that the 2004 remastered version is the more accurate of the two Chirping CD variants. This is based mainly on the observation that, with volume matched samples, the 1987 CD sounds muddier. I'm assuming it was produced from a production copy of the master tapes rather than from the master tapes themselves. As far as whether compression was applied to the newer disc, this is a tough call because for the most part the songs seem to have dynamics intact, with differences in level appearing (to me, at least) to be due to the use of better tape sources and better analog to digital transfer techniques for the newer disc. One song that appears to have been compressed, "That'll Be the Day," sounds essentially the same on the 2004 remaster as it does on the 1993 Buddy Holly Collection, but I wouldn't expect a 1993 issue of this material to have suffered from the heavy hand of dynamic range compression. Another song, "Last Night," clearly looks to have been mastered too loud, and zooming into the waveform does indeed show some minor clipping in several spots, while "An Empty Cup (And a Broken Date)" seems to show this to an even greater degree, but again, both sound just fine. Was this slight clipping allowed through, understanding that it wouldn't be audible, in order to make the song just that tiny bit louder (something that I've seen on other discs)? Overall, this is such a tough call to make that I'm not actually going to make it. The newer Chirping CD sounds subjectively better than the older one, and thus that's the one I'm going with here.