> Firstly, it has been extremely common for albums to be sold with very compressed dynamic range, assuming the average consumer will be listening in noisy environments etc. However, the mastering supplied to Hi Res shops sometimes lacks that compression, so that is where you can hear the album with room to breathe

I had a friend who was extolling the virtues of Hi Res for the pop music he was buying so I asked him to send me a track, and it had the same brick compression as the standard iTunes version and sounded just as flat (I was hoping that even if it was compressed the same, the extra resolution meant that you could recover the detail, but there wasn't an audible improvement).

If that's what they want to sell, they need to create an actual term for that, like the audio version of "Director's Cut", not just sneak it into some random Hi Res releases and hope you find "the good ones" while the rest are snake oil.