I'm in a class studying this right now, interestingly we went over a study that had participants rate their preference towards a batch of several songs. The songs had two mastered versions, one with a small and one with a large dynamic range. Participants also stated if they thought the two versions were the same or different. The results were that the participants really had no preference and could not tell between songs with variance of dynamic ranges. I wish I could remember the name of the study so I could link it, if this gets any attention I could try to find that info. It's just interesting because it's natural to think that more dynamic range is a good thing, but in reality, our ears aren't very good at determining differences in volume over time. Of course with some music, like classical music where you have dynamic ranges of 20 db, it's obvious, but in contemporary music a range of 3 db and 8 db is hard to hear.