They all need to be turned down even in analog - every Toronto station for example, sounds like garbage, especially 102.1 and 107.1    Whoever is handling Boom 973's sound seems to have it set pretty decent giving you atleast some good sound quality.

The same kind of thing exists in music streaming with volume normalization as the loudness wars from mixing engineers over the past decades has created loss of dynamic range.

Did not know this could impact HD signals however..interesting. 

RadioActive wrote:

An interesting article in Broadcast Dialogue cites a study that claims some radio operators are deliberately sending out an overmodulated signal to increase how loud their stations sound to listeners - but it may also be responsible for obliterating their own HD stations.

"Hired by a major market station to investigate why listeners were losing their HD Radio signal, (Paul) Kriegler uncovered a jaw-dropping culprit: the station’s program director had quietly cranked the composite output of their audio processor to 137% modulation directly from his phone.The hyper-compressed analog signal was so grossly over-modulated that its sidebands were physically blotting out the station’s own HD digital broadcast."

Radio’s volume war is driving away listeners

Radio veteran Alan Cross weighs in on the loudness wars and makes it clear where he stands - even if his employer didn't always agree. 

"As program director of two stations back then, this drove me nuts because I knew that overmodulation created listener fatigue. Frequencies in the mid-range became harsh and grating. I wanted to turn down the compression, but I was overruled every single time by the powers-the-be. “Louder is better for ratings,” they insisted."

There’s a volume war in the world of radio. It needs to stop. And it just might.

Alan Cross is absolutely right. Most station managers who call the shots on modulation (AM or FM) don't have the faintest clue about how the human brain rebels at music and voice with excessive (and therefore unnatural) reduction in dynamic range.  The should be forced to sit in a chair with headphones on for a full 8 hours, and then listen to a proper processing setup so they can experience relief. Having an in-line aggressive compressor in a mic channel cranked so that every "p" and "t" pops incessantly is painful, and the all news and all sports stations are especially bad at this.
Over-processing in FM is a throwback to the AM days where the apparent coverage range is indeed a function of peak output power.  But even with AM, there is delicate balance where punch becomes pain. The new fangled multi-band processors create intolerable intermodulation distortion when the music is complex.
If FM station management is indeed achieving its goals by getting high hours tuned, why are they worried about sounding louder than the other guy?
Check out Classic 96.3 and tell me it doesn't sound great. Loud enough, yet balanced.  If things haven't been changed, they are using an Omnia 9 set to the Classical/Jazz preset which has only three bands of processing.
The comment about aggressive processing in recorded music is also very pertinent, especially when online music is being downloaded. It gets exacerbated if whoever is doing the download doesn't make the effort to find a selection with the highest possible bitrate, preferably .wav and not .mp3
All of these artifacts get cascaded, and the result in audio garbage.

As a noted musician once said, "less is more".

If your station can play Dark Side of the Moon, side 1, without breathing and sounding like hell, you've done a good job with the processing .  If you can take the automation feed down long enough to play with it, throw in Donald Fagen's The Nightfly and Steely Dan's AJA.  Optimize those, and nobody can touch you!!  

Brings up an interesting question, though: what are your benchmark tracks or titles for setting up your on-air chain, or even just your regular stereo at home?  You know, your CH Precision L10 feeding the Relentless Epic 1600 into your Magico M9's.