
Just to illustrate one of the things I'm talking about, a person could cue up both mixes, and play the new one from about 00:18 - 00:25, then play the same part on the radio mix, which translates to about 00:42 - 00:49. The differences will be crystal clear.
While the nuances in Perry's delivery have been muted on the new version, listen to the old one and you'll hear all of his attitude and inflections. The new mix sounds like you're hearing Perry, and everything else, through cotton stuffed in your ears. Go back and forth between the mixes. The guitar in the new mix is so saturated with reverb that it drowns out all of the more subtle sounds. Listen to the little bass pluck details on the radio mix, right after Perry sings "I am the red flag that you wave" and before his next line. Now listen to that same part on the new mix, and those details are all but completely lost. All of the crispness and nuance and color is strangled out of the track, and we're left with a foggy sonic murk. Perry seems to be singing to us from down in the basement.
That's just part of what drove me nuts about the newer mix. Even considering how it fits into that loudness wars crap, the this new version still seems bizarrely muddy. The thing that really gets me is that we probably will never hear crisper, more dynamic versions of the rest of the songs on the album. By the time we hear them they'll all have been submerged in aural muck. Hopefully there's some kind of Hyperleaked type of thing and we can hear the entire album in a nice crisp form.