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Originally Posted by Unknown Soldier My feeling towards this album have always been mixed, first off its got some great songs and it was the bands best album in years when it came out and I loved the way they returned to a harder rocking sound, after years of never nailing down a proper sound in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. The big down-point of this album though was the production, I remember years ago reading about its production techniques and the issues a lot of reviewers had with it, as I found the music was just too loud in relation to the vocals of Geddy Lee, which kind of dampened the impact of the album.

The production of Vapor Trails has been criticized because of the album's "loud" sound quality. Albums such as this have been mastered so loud that additional digital distortion is generated during the production of the CD. The trend, known as the loudness war, has become very common on modern rock CDs.

As told by Rip Rowan on the ProRec website, the damaged production is the result of overly compressed (clipped) audio levels during mastering,[8] though Rush has admitted that there was digital distortion during recording, which also contributed to the damage. Remastering the album would not correct the damage from digital distortion that was introduced during recording, but it could correct the other, more destructive damage that is the result of overly compressing the audio during mastering.

On Retrospective 3, Richard Chycki, who recently worked with the band on the R30 and both the Snakes & Arrows album and live sets, remixed "One Little Victory", and "Earthshine". In an interview with Modern Guitars, Lifeson remarked that since the remixes were so good, there has been talk of doing an entire remix of the album.