What is a "loudness war"? first let us look into wikipedia. The following quotation:
The loudness war or loudness race is a pejorative name for the apparent competition to digitally master and release recordings with increasing loudness.
The phenomenon was first reported with respect to mastering practices for 7" singles. The maximum peak level of analog recordings such as these is limited by the specifications of electronic equipment along the chain from source to listener, including vinyl record and cassette players.
With the advent of the Compact Disc (CD), music is encoded to a digital format with a clearly defined maximum peak amplitude. Once the maximum amplitude of a CD is reached, loudness can be increased still further through signal processing techniques such as dynamic range compression and equalization. Engineers can apply an increasingly high ratio of compression to a recording until it more frequently peaks at the maximum amplitude. Extreme uses of dynamic range compression can introduce clipping and other audible distortion. Modern albums that use such extreme dynamic range compression therefore sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as "victims of the loudness war".
By looking at the quote above, The Loudness War can be interpreted simply as the Cold War practitioners, especially audio editing mastering engineer that the master of good audio is very loud.
Reference: http://wikipedia.org
