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Comment by shams93

7 years ago

Exactly if it’s mastered wrong the nitrate has nothing to do with the issue this music would sound just as awful cut to vinyl from a bad master. Now you just can’t hear beyond 22050 so 192 is insanely wasteful. But poor mastering is absolutely the core issue not encoding algorithms

Actually, no, it might sound better cut to vinyl. Remember, vinyl doesn't have the frequency range or dynamic range that digital audio does, and it has to be mastered using the RIAA Curve because of the properties of the medium. One factor here is that the stereo separation on vinyl can't be too large, or else the needle will literally jump out of the groove! In short, you can't just take CD music (no matter how well or poorly mastered) and cut it to vinyl as-is.

  • > it might sound better cut to vinyl

    There's nothing extra in a 192kHz signal that would help with the vinyl mastering process. You could make a technical argument for the benefits of a 24-bit source, but in practice even those benefits would be utterly swamped by the SNR of vinyl.

    • You're completely misunderstanding. No, there's nothing extra in the 192kHz signal that would help, but that's not the point. Just remastering it for vinyl, which has certain limitations, might make it sound better than the digital format. As I said, you cannot just cut CD audio to vinyl; the medium won't allow it. You'll probably have the needle bouncing out of the track. So remastering for vinyl might actually make it sound better than the abomination that is the sound of modern CD-audio (because of the Loudness War and extreme compression), not because the fidelity is better (in fact, quite the opposite), but because vinyl's limitations will prevent them from making the audio sound as horrible as it does on CD.

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