as an artist i have been in the studio and have done recordings at both a crappy studio and the best studio in town (morrisound) and the volume that a cd is actually recorded to depends on the equipment used, most engineers will record at a level that is low enough so that during tracking the intruments don't track so loud that they cause clipping on the actual recording, then the audio levels are then raised in mixing and mastering to the level we get on our cd's. In the albums mentioned i imagine the engineer doing the mixing and mastering had the levels that high on purpose in order to give the music a natural distortion at any volume.

and as far as the software that you want, the only one i can think of is pro-tools but you'd need the master tracks in order to get the information you want, but even without the master tracks from any given recording you can always pick up an mbox2 and make your own recordings and figure it out yourself, but you also need to figure out if the 500$ price tag of the mbox and the some few hundred for pro-tools is worth the argument.

if any of this helped then cool, but you guys know more than i do, just giving yall an insight to what goes on in the recording studio

 

cool, thanks for the info