Advent of digital mixing and therefore the loudness wars started roughly contemporaneously with the compact disc audio format becoming mainstream. Most complaints of AAD mixes of old vinyls converted to disc were poor, and DDD mastered stuff sounded harsh because of the novelty of compression (audio compressor, not filesize or redbook/Wav/CD-A compression.)

Maybe. I lived through the 90s as a cd purchaser and I tend to agree, CDs were real nice, but different. By the time I had a cd player, tapes had exotic coatings and EQ-trickery to mask the hiss and whatnot of tape media.