Vinyl literally has less than half the dynamic range of CD and has always been compressed before cutting.
Hard limiting is a (stupid) choice, but some limiting has always been necessary.
The "warm vinyl sound" is basically analog compression with added low-end distortion from the RIAA compensation and some wrinkles at the high end caused by stylus resonance.
The dynamic range of the format isn't the issue though, it's the mastering. CD mastering largely pushed volume at the expense of dynamic range (part of the reason we see endless remasters these days). Vinyl doesn't automatically mean a better master but older stuff is much less compressed.
That is a false way of saying it. Because then you are unpacking what dBs are, which is fascinating, but not how humans perceive sound. We use dBs exactly because it approaches human experience of sound better (although still shitty) than sound pressure would.
A better logarithmic system would use base 2, I think phons tried to popularize that, but signal processing calculation with a base 2 log is less convenient than a base 10 log. So I think that is the reason.
For who wants to know: sound perception doubles every 10dB so. 30db of dynamic range is about 8 times as much dynamic range from the perceptual perspective.
CD has better dynamic range, sure. But a CD is also able to represent a signal with _much less dynamic range_ than it’s possible to cut on a record.
It was the move to digital that facilitated the loudness war.
In modern years it’s been fairly common for masters to vinyl to be less compressed than the CD release, for the simple reason vinyl has more limitations.
I prefer to buy original releases of CDs second hand on Discogs. I then digitize them with Exact Audio Copy.
I never bought into the recent vinyl hype. Though I really like the beautiful design of many new vinyl releases, I don't think they are for being played. But I used to buy new and used vinyl as a teenager to actually listen to them, and occasionally I still buy used vinyl. Vinyl records from the flea market were as cheap as 1€, so that was an efficient way to grow my music collection before file sharing was a thing.
But now I prefer CDs because what really interests me is the music itself and I simply prefer the version with the best mastering. That's often CD releases from the early 1980s to mid 1990s.
And yes, I still buy music because I don't trust music streaming to be around forever. At least I think there is a real chance CDs will outlast individual services for sure. And in case the internet gets shut down because of war, at least I still have music as long as I have power.
This. I'm 55. My teenage years were in the 1980s, where CDs started to appear but vinyl was still mainstream. I remember Dad having a significant vinyl library and I also got my own collection.
But I hated caring for that thing. The medium is finicky, prone to scratches and whatnot, and CDs had more length and also more range and better sound. So as soon as I was able to get CDs, I got rid of my vinyl collection faster than one does it with a hot potato in their hands. I used vinyl daily, hated the whole burden of caring for it; and against CDs, I really found them wanting.
Too bad the medium got degraded with idiots who used dynamic compression, but inherently CDs and lossless digital audio in general is way much better. I never understood the vinyl resurgence, until some people explained it as being something more performative and also a way to get better artwork and physical mementos of the music. Understandable, but I still feel it's weird.
For me, it's the expense and the inconvenience... as the meme goes. But anyway - I just like it; when I put on a record it's like "I'm doing this now and nothing else". Sitting on the couch and listening to Dark Side with a glass of wine. Remembering when my dad used to play records and I wasn't allowed to touch it because the stylus was expensive and fragile. It's a vibe, as the kids say.
I keep 3 pressings of Led Zep II out so I can demonstrate the difference to people who don’t believe that there is one. A first-week Robert Ludwig mastered version, a second-week pressing of the Ahmet Ertegun disaster, and 1977 remaster that really sounds just as good as the 1969 RL mix and is a lot cheaper. $20 for a VG+ copy compared to $1300. I am not insane so I did not spend $1300 on a used vinyl record, I found mine for $2 at Goodwill.
Depending on which vinyl you're talking about. I care very little about big names signed to big corpo - they can do whatever they want to their vinyl. There are plenty of indi/underground artists releasing both on vinyl and tampe, who succumbed to nothing, but are alive and well actually. Check bandcamp more often for clues, should you disagree.
PSA: https://dr.loudness-war.info/ is a great place to look for info on dynamic range of releases, and also, a great place to find new music with excellent dynamic range.
Good site, but it has some frustrating limitations that make it vastly less useful, specifically regarding the phenomenon in the article. The search UI doesn’t expose the release code (and many entries don’t even include it), so when it says “vinyl” you have no idea which of the possibly dozens of releases it refers to, some of which can be awful, like the article points out.
I’m willing to help fix this, but the source code is not public, and when I emailed the author I got no response.
PSA 2: the formula used here can easily be gamed via inaudible phase alteration and can't be used to compare CD and LP. Ears are still much better until a correctly designed metric arrives.
There are usefull software components (=extensions) for the foobar2000 music player (sadly Windows only player) that can analyze the dynamic range and loudness according to EBU standards.
foo_dr_meter: A simple Dynamic Range meter based on DR estimation formula published by https://dr.loudness-war.info/
ReplayGain is part of the core components of foobar2000, so automatically adjusting the volume depending on the loudness of the trakc or entire album is pretty much a default feature of this player. The latter two components, especially the latter one give valuable insights into the loudness and mastering quality of a recording. True Peak can calculate the Peak-to-Integrated Loudness of a recording for example the headroom between loudest part and the maximum possible loudness of the format, or it tells you the loudness range in LUFS meaning how squished or wide the dynamic range of a track is. Really nifty if you have a huge music collection and need numbers to quickly compare releases.
Yeah, I know a lot of indie artists. Most of that vinyl is produced straight off the 44.1/16 digital master. If you think it's analog (or in many cases even properly mastered at all), you're fooling yourself.
The "loudness war" issue is not inherent to digital sources. Nor is it something you need to "master the record out of". It's sufficient to not break it in the first place.
The issue is that vinyl mastering is a special case and different from digital mastering. You have to consider extra things like the width of the grooves, they can vary depending on the runtime of a side, this affects low frequencies as grooves might cut into each other and you'll get skips. And high frequencies degrade the closer you get towards the center of the record. I just think the people who can do this craft are simply retiring or dying out. This affects major label and indie artists alike.
This is mostly the result of a lot of vinyl factories having shut down due to vinyl becoming mostly irrelevant after the release of more convenient formats like the CD. At least irrelevant enough to make factories unsustainable. Most modern vinyls have extremely bad quality, I'd even go as far and say almost all freshly produced vinyls. Source: I've worked in a high end luxury HiFi store for years prior to getting into tech, selling turn tables, tube amps, speakers and basically whatever you can think off in that space.
I don't understand why they still release super compressed and loud masterings when most of the modern headphones are so good you don't really need to master for the old cheap stereo sets. And isn't headphones with Spotify the most common medium for music nowadays?
1. Compressed sound can be an integral (wanted) part of different genre aesthetics. I personally love dynamic mixes, but if you let your customers A/B mixes they will often chose the more compressed/louder one. If your song sounds weak after another bands song, that is an issue.
2. For reasons of health/liability there are maximum levels on headphones and mobile playback devices. That means if my mix has a high dynamic range the bulk of it may really just be too low when played back on the majority of headphones. If I mix my own music this is a bargain I can make if I mix other peoples music I would try to be a little more on the cautious side if the musicians didn't demand a highly dynamic mix.
3. Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music. 90% of people who listen to music do not listen to it actively, they just let it run in the background or are passively exposed to it. Try listening to a good dynamic recording of Beethovens fith in your car with the window rolled down. You will hear some strong phrases then inbetween nothing as it is below the ambient noise floor.
Vinyl has the benefit, that I as the mixing engineer can assume that the listener will be much more likely actively involved with the music than say in a radio mix.
And just wait until they find out that compressor/limiters came about for reasons other than shaping the dynamics of music. If you're not slammed against the wall, your AM broadcast signal isn't going far.
Vinyl has the benefit that you can largely assume that it will NOT be listened to at all, cf. the studies showing that half of all vinyl buyers don’t even own a turntable.
> 1 … they will often chose the more compressed/louder one
I’ve always been curious - but presumably that’s true even after volume matching?
> 3 Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music
I’ve heard this is also why film and video game soundtracks are often very compressed, even when orchestral, because they have to fit in the background with dialog/sfx
All things being equal, the compressed tracks will still sound louder even after normalisation, unfortunately. I haven't seen any sign of dynamics returning to pop music since Spotify/YouTube.
Most headphones people actually use are crap. Yes you can buy studio monitors from sony. That isn't what people are listening to. They are using airpods which sound like earpods have always sounded: crap, absent lows, terrible separation. So you compress the hell out of the audio and make it loud so you can actually hear something with those headphones.
What AirPods are you talking about? The wired AirPods that sound pretty bad have been overtaken by wireless Bluetooth AirPods for many years now. The AirPod Pro 2 sound quality is a world of difference from the wired earbud style AirPods. In fact, most of the most popular TWS Bluetooth Earbuds have fantastic sound quality. The main issue with them is that they have a V shaped tuning, with various levels of bad. However, Apple and Samsung tunings are quite decent.
Most people listen to music in their car. More compressed audio means less fiddling with the volume knob as you drive, regardless of normalization done by Spotify et al.
Most people aren't in a quiet environment when they listen to music these days. Compression helps significantly with this.
What would be neat would be to have a compression metadata 'guide' that would allow a compressor on-device to perform the compression, rather than baked into the audio track.
This would allow the user to tune 'severity' of compression. In a car / fancy headphones, you could sample the ambient noise level and adjust accordingly.
Compression can definitely help with that, but so can automating the volume knob. If it were just about keeping volume consistent, they would compress different tracks differently (which they do).
They overly compress the master channel specifically to make it very loud, and there's dozens of interviews with engineers that are frustrated with it.
There's still plenty of crappy headphones, as others have pointed out, but consider also listening from a phone's speaker, a cheap bluetooth speaker, with just one earbud/headphone on, etc.
Speaking of, I think the sound quality of modern-day bluetooth speakers is really good.
> I think the sound quality of modern-day bluetooth speakers is really good.
The sound quality out of the speakers of some Apple products seems borderline impossible to me. The MacBook in particular makes me feel like I missed an important DSP lecture at university.
It's true from time to time. Low's last digital releases are actually unlistenable due to heavy-handed compression, but the vinyl seems to have been spared.
I had to record the vinyl to get usable digital files.
I'd say "rarely" instead of "often" though it depends on the genre I guess. There are also a lot of genres that can never sound as good on vinyl simply due to the lack of dynamic range/silence; mostly classical and electronic.
I've been collecting physical music my whole life and there were times that I tried to get everything on CD, times I tried to get everything on vinyl, times I've tried to go fully digital, and the pattern I've fallen into now in my late 30s is buying music on whatever medium was popular when it came out.
I've now got a pretty mixed collection of records, tapes, CDs, digital music, and even a rockbox modded ipod. An added facet of fun for me when I find new music is to decide what the most thematically appropriate format to own it is.
For example I own the CD for Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay because there's a CD in the art, and it feels like a very 00s album, but for vaporwave I almost exclusively buy cassettes.
I thought the loudness war was over? This was a hot topic for many years in the music production community. Sad to see it still persists. Especially since the answer to any loudness problem is to simply for the user to turn up the volume.
The loudness war in the strict "we must compress and slam everything as much as possible to make our stuff sound good on the radio" sense is over thanks to Spotify et al doing loudness normalization, but there's still an open question of "how much compression does sound good?" which is extremely subjective. A lot of modern music is louder than peak loudness war stuff just because the creators want their music to be slammed to shit. I listen to/make aggressive bass music and -5, -4, -3 LUFS are common. (By comparison, some of the common examples of loudness war era CDs like Definitely Maybe and Californication sit between -8 and -6 LUFS.)
> Especially since the answer to any loudness problem is to simply for the user to turn up the volume.
This isn't quite true as compression addresses differences in volume. Unless you expect the listener to actively turn up the volume during the quiet parts and down during the loud parts of your song, or be listening in a completely quiet environment with nothing but the music so they can appreciate the dynamics--which is the way a lot of vinyl aficionados do listen to music.
I've taken to buying SACDs when possible. The format supports higher dynamic range, but that barely matters. The mix is the bigger issue and SACD mixes are often better.
Note you need an SACD player.
And also note this only applies for playing on a proper HiFi or with good headphones at least.
In your car, etc you probably want the compressed mix.
I vaguely recall reading about a double-blind test with the DSD stream from an SACD converted to 44.1kHz 16-bit PCM.
Even without proper dithering, listeners could not tell the difference between that and the SACD[1], but could tell the difference between that and the CD version of the same album.
I read that as: SACD customers expect a better mix.
The format is only relevant in that it requires audiophile level dedication and money to use the format in the first place. Not dissimilar to vinyl before its recent boom.
I have an SACD setup, but for what I want to listen to, everything is out of print and secondary market is insane. Players can be found relatively cheaply at thrift stores (many don’t bluray and multi-CD carousels support it with digital output).
It's a weird social psychology quirk. For whatever reason, the entire music industry has been captured by the delusion that mixing all the sounds louder is good. No one likes it, except for those guys. For reasons I'll never understand, the movie industry has been captured by the opposite delusion; they're going to pump dynamic range so high that you can only understand about half the dialogue in the movie. And of course, no one likes this.
The full dynamic range is nice if you actually want to experience it and have a system capable of reproducing it. A dedicated center channel with a few hundred watts of amplification behind it will cut through the ambient backdrop like a hot knife through butter. You can watch Transformers or MI3 at reference volume with crystal clear dialogue if you're willing to throw enough power at the problem.
What really would solve the movie issue is there was more standardised sound across different streaming services. Every single seems to have a different volume and compression / setup.
That and having an industry standard way to crank the center channel (user setting) when downmixing to 2.1
I have a decent[1] system with a dedicated center channel. Everybody complains that the mix is too loud if we tune for audible dialog on anything made in the past decade or so (MI3 bluray is fine, and I suspect that Transformers would be too).
1: Powered by a Denon AVR, not separates if you want to "No true cinephile" me.
remember when HN was saying "nobody wants big smartphones, why does the industry keep doing this? iPhone 4 size is the perfect size"
hint - the industry is doing EXACTLY what (most) consumers want. there is a big difference between what a consumer tells you they want, and what actually they pay for
There are probably 100 times more people listening to billboards hot 100 on crappy headphones if not phone speakers than people who know what "dynamic range" means…
You're false. Research has shown that if people like sound A, they will like it even better when you play sound A louder.
The change in mixing and mastering can be largely explained by people changing the way they consume it. Eg. people watch more movies on netflix than in a cinema. People used to sit in a room with a record player, now they listen in their car or headphones while doing other stuff.
This is anecdotal at best; "those guys" will be using hard data just like tech bros with ecommerce sites do, and the data does not lie.
Compression sells better than high dynamic range else they would have stopped. This is true for every "nobody likes this" statement people make on the internet about things that are commercially successful nevertheless. Big phones (as someone else mentioned), mobile games, video game movie adaptations, AI music, Marvel franchise entries, funko pops, they're all running circles around people that don't personally like it and who are in circles of like-minded people.
When people listen to two pieces of audio they generally prefer the louder of the two. That doesn't mean they want you to turn up the volume dial for them. They can adjust the volume dial themselves, and if everything gets louder they'll turn down the volume dial to compensate.
No, you need the original mix to remaster it yourself.
If you just amplify the whole track until its max amplitude reaches the medium's maximum, yes you could undo that.
But the loudness war aims to make the whole track even louder than that, by quietening those max peaks so they don't clip, then that gives you room to amplify the rest of the track even further. The dynamic range of the recording is permanently reduced.
people said "it's impossible to separate tracks (voice, bass, ...) after they are mixed". true in theory, but neural-networks can separate them in practice
same here, but there is no real market for somebody to bother yet
"Assuming no clipping" is the biggest problem there, because the loudness wars resulted in a ton of very lossy clipping and similar artifacts. Arguably that sort of distortion became part of the expected sound, though, so just because it isn't reversible doesn't necessarily mean it is a problem.
In the open metadata world there is ReplayGain which analyzes music peaks and tries to create a negative gain to equalize the dynamic range to a standard volume at both the individual track and full album level.
Apple Music, Spotify, and others have proprietary but similar systems.
(As someone who deeply loves to shuffle an entire library, having a music player that supports ReplayGain has long been a personal requirement.)
No, it's a destructive process. It's like trying to get back the original texture of wood after you've sanded it down. The best you're going to get is an approximation of what it might have been like.
There are tools to mitigate clipping artifacts, and tools to generate new transients for overly compressed files, but they're not a silver-bullet and the new material that is generated is more of a best guess than a true replacement for not over-compressing a mix in the first place.
These tools are most useful when used earlier in the process. Like when you just tracked an amazing vocal take, but the gain was too hot on one or two notes. The tools can mitigate some of the distortion artifacts to make it more usable. Applying these tools to complex material like a full mix will have some improvements, but at that stage there's less guarantee for convincing restoration of the record.
What I think non-professionals don't understand is that a record that is characterized by heavy compression is not something that happened at the very end with the mastering stage. It is an aesthetic choice that was made dozens of times along the way while recording, arranging, and mixing. Heavy compression is not necessarily a bad thing. Lots of amazing-sounding records harness it well. It's an art AND a craft. It takes audio engineers and producers years to do it well and with taste.
you can use an expander or something more advanced like Ozone 12's Unlimiter. you still lose signal when you compress even if you're not clipping so it won't be perfect
Even without clipping (which loud mixes almost invariably have), you lose resolution; for digital it should be obvious that if you start with M distinct values and remap them to N distinct values, you can't reverse it if M>N (which it will be for compression).
For analog there are similar limitations, but it's limited by other factors like noise.
In electronic music we've been pressing the same DAT to vinyl and CD since the 90s. Subsequently replaced by .wav. Tracks come out of the DAW pretty loud these days, it's characteristic of the genre.
Do you think the removal of technical limitations re: the number of tracks & voices has introduced "loudness" as well in terms of more distinct sounds competing for the same sonic space?
It's crazy watching some of the producer YT videos now and they open up these projects with 105 tracks, multi-layered/multi-voice drums, etc.
They did that back in the reel to reel tape days too...it was just destructive. Songs could have tons of layers, but they had to bounce tracks down to stay within track limits for the final mix.
Queen's music is a massive pile of overdubs, especially for vocals and guitar. The Beatles also, and they were heavily into looping (physically cutting audio tape and gluing it in a loop, then re-recording it). Vocal and guitar double-tracking has also been the norm since the 50s, at least.
80s pop was also generally full of synthesizer stacks, where MIDI from one keyboard was simultaneously triggering several synths to create layers.
This makes sense as a huge part of the people who buy vinyl don't even own a record player. Or people buy special editions with colored vinyl, who would never play these records back anyway. If the main target demographic doesn't even notice bad mastering let alone have a clue what good mastering on any record would even sound like, what's the point? Vinyl has become a fashion accessory you buy as just another fan merch item.
I mean it's inevitable that businesses will unify the pipelines. If there's profit in vinyl records, there's obviously more profit if you don't have to put any extra effort in.
The loudness war was never exclusive to digital audio formats though, it just reached saturation point [heh] with CDs. This didn't happen earlier because clipping isn't a thing on records -- saturation (practically some margin below that) is a hard limit.
Hard article to follow unfortunately. Also the only example it gives just shows a compressed waveform. I understand disliking that compared to the more dynamic older record, but a perfectly reasonable explanation for this would be: it sounds more like what buyers today expect.
Is that really true? Anybody buying music today instead of streaming is somebody who takes music more seriously than most. It seems likely they're going to care more about sound quality than the streaming audience.
Is it true? No idea. It's plausible. My point was that one example of a heavily compressed track doesn't make a loudness war. I offered a plausible alternative explanation of the same facts.
It seems likely that someone buying a mass market album today would expect it to sound pretty similar across all formats.
I don't know why you've introduced this 'serious' vs. streaming thing.
What does taking music more seriously even mean here? If you seriously like listening to normalised Purple Rain on 128 kbps mp3 and also like collecting physical media, you might seriously like to buy and listen to normalised Purple Rain on your preferred (lossless, or less-lossy) format.
And who, exactly, would approve that misguided proposal?
I suspect you’re not involved in contemporary record making. Like it or not, clipping is a technique and a color that producers, mixers, and mastering engineers all choose to impart for aesthetic and technical reasons. It has it’s uses.
If your proposal were passed all that would be left for consideration would be a handful lame DSD jazz records from those hi-fi enthusiasts who are disconnected from the reality around how most records are made these days.
Everybody is lazy nowadays and sends their ruined digital mixes out for everything. It's the production teams that need to fix their behavior.
What RIAA should do is promote universal use of ReplayGain across digital distribution platforms. That way people can manage relative volume as desired without the need to corrupt the audio. They could make money with a signed tag certifying the mix meets quality standards.
I'm guessing you're not a musician or studio worker, or I wasn't clear.
If I am using an analog device (in my case tube amplifier) I want to listen to something that was mastered on analog equipment. If it's square wave pressed on to vinyl you might as well stream.
Because the TV wouldn't be as good a representation of the original painting as the canvas print would be. Similarly, vinyl wouldn't be as good a representation of the original sound as CDs would be.
Sorry, as cool as I find it from a mechanical perspective, I can never approve of vinyl.
From the perspective of an amateur DJ and dedicated dancer, vinyl never really died in the underground dance scene, whether talking about the UK dubscene or German techno.
And as much as I love and respect vinyl DJs, the medium itself is often used to make vinyl exclusive releases (looking at you UK), gatekeeping the music literally, make the runs limited and super exclusive, and obviously super expensive.
Not to mention it makes little sense, musically, to put a digitally produced track on an analog medium. Collecting old music on vinyl is one thing, getting all your new music (produced on Abelton) as vinyl is just silly to me. Again, completely understand why vinyl only DJs do it.
To me vinyl is totally contrary to the DIY culture of underground dance music, and I simply won't buy any new vinyl (not to say DJ culture is DIY, but techno culture for example really is at its core punk DIY).
I would much rather the producer just made a shirt instead of a special deluxe vinyl edition for the super fans with too much money (and the couple of vinyl only DJs that will buy it). I'd rather spend that money on more new music, that I can own as FLAC forever.
And I would REALLY like if all the old vinyls were professionally ripped and sold by their labels. Because sooner or later they WILL all disappear, which I guess if you're a collector/secretive DJ is a good thing... Really shocking that a lot of this old music can only be found in good quality on Youtube rips. Yes, better than if you were able to dig out a 30 year old record in a store.
Vinyl literally has less than half the dynamic range of CD and has always been compressed before cutting.
Hard limiting is a (stupid) choice, but some limiting has always been necessary.
The "warm vinyl sound" is basically analog compression with added low-end distortion from the RIAA compensation and some wrinkles at the high end caused by stylus resonance.
Which is why it's so bizarre that CDs are generally less dynamic than vinyl. There's no technical reason that should be the case.
CDs were most commonly played in cars on the loud highway
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There is, see my other reply.
CDs are able to store much louder tracks than can be cut on a record. The technical reason things on CD got louder is because they could.
The dynamic range of the format isn't the issue though, it's the mastering. CD mastering largely pushed volume at the expense of dynamic range (part of the reason we see endless remasters these days). Vinyl doesn't automatically mean a better master but older stuff is much less compressed.
> Vinyl literally has less than half the dynamic range of CD
A lot less than half.
It's around 20-30db and every 10db is a factor of 10. The CD has between 100-1000x more dynamic range.
That is a false way of saying it. Because then you are unpacking what dBs are, which is fascinating, but not how humans perceive sound. We use dBs exactly because it approaches human experience of sound better (although still shitty) than sound pressure would. A better logarithmic system would use base 2, I think phons tried to popularize that, but signal processing calculation with a base 2 log is less convenient than a base 10 log. So I think that is the reason.
For who wants to know: sound perception doubles every 10dB so. 30db of dynamic range is about 8 times as much dynamic range from the perceptual perspective.
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CD has better dynamic range, sure. But a CD is also able to represent a signal with _much less dynamic range_ than it’s possible to cut on a record.
It was the move to digital that facilitated the loudness war.
In modern years it’s been fairly common for masters to vinyl to be less compressed than the CD release, for the simple reason vinyl has more limitations.
> Vinyl literally has less than half the dynamic range of CD
In theory, yes. In practice it depends on the "loudness".
Also covered by Tech Radar (2025) -- You need to be careful when buying new vinyl – the digital music loudness war can mean they sound worse than second-hand records: https://www.techradar.com/audio/turntables/you-need-to-be-ca...
I prefer to buy original releases of CDs second hand on Discogs. I then digitize them with Exact Audio Copy.
I never bought into the recent vinyl hype. Though I really like the beautiful design of many new vinyl releases, I don't think they are for being played. But I used to buy new and used vinyl as a teenager to actually listen to them, and occasionally I still buy used vinyl. Vinyl records from the flea market were as cheap as 1€, so that was an efficient way to grow my music collection before file sharing was a thing.
But now I prefer CDs because what really interests me is the music itself and I simply prefer the version with the best mastering. That's often CD releases from the early 1980s to mid 1990s.
And yes, I still buy music because I don't trust music streaming to be around forever. At least I think there is a real chance CDs will outlast individual services for sure. And in case the internet gets shut down because of war, at least I still have music as long as I have power.
> I never bought into the recent vinyl hype.
This. I'm 55. My teenage years were in the 1980s, where CDs started to appear but vinyl was still mainstream. I remember Dad having a significant vinyl library and I also got my own collection.
But I hated caring for that thing. The medium is finicky, prone to scratches and whatnot, and CDs had more length and also more range and better sound. So as soon as I was able to get CDs, I got rid of my vinyl collection faster than one does it with a hot potato in their hands. I used vinyl daily, hated the whole burden of caring for it; and against CDs, I really found them wanting.
Too bad the medium got degraded with idiots who used dynamic compression, but inherently CDs and lossless digital audio in general is way much better. I never understood the vinyl resurgence, until some people explained it as being something more performative and also a way to get better artwork and physical mementos of the music. Understandable, but I still feel it's weird.
>I never bought into the recent vinyl hype.
For me, it's the expense and the inconvenience... as the meme goes. But anyway - I just like it; when I put on a record it's like "I'm doing this now and nothing else". Sitting on the couch and listening to Dark Side with a glass of wine. Remembering when my dad used to play records and I wasn't allowed to touch it because the stylus was expensive and fragile. It's a vibe, as the kids say.
I prefer original pressings whenever possible. It's still sometimes cheaper, but that is quickly going the other way.
I keep 3 pressings of Led Zep II out so I can demonstrate the difference to people who don’t believe that there is one. A first-week Robert Ludwig mastered version, a second-week pressing of the Ahmet Ertegun disaster, and 1977 remaster that really sounds just as good as the 1969 RL mix and is a lot cheaper. $20 for a VG+ copy compared to $1300. I am not insane so I did not spend $1300 on a used vinyl record, I found mine for $2 at Goodwill.
https://www.therevolverclub.com/blogs/the-revolver-club/the-...
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Tech radar article links to the article mentioned by this post.
Depending on which vinyl you're talking about. I care very little about big names signed to big corpo - they can do whatever they want to their vinyl. There are plenty of indi/underground artists releasing both on vinyl and tampe, who succumbed to nothing, but are alive and well actually. Check bandcamp more often for clues, should you disagree.
PSA: https://dr.loudness-war.info/ is a great place to look for info on dynamic range of releases, and also, a great place to find new music with excellent dynamic range.
Good site, but it has some frustrating limitations that make it vastly less useful, specifically regarding the phenomenon in the article. The search UI doesn’t expose the release code (and many entries don’t even include it), so when it says “vinyl” you have no idea which of the possibly dozens of releases it refers to, some of which can be awful, like the article points out.
I’m willing to help fix this, but the source code is not public, and when I emailed the author I got no response.
PSA 2: the formula used here can easily be gamed via inaudible phase alteration and can't be used to compare CD and LP. Ears are still much better until a correctly designed metric arrives.
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There are usefull software components (=extensions) for the foobar2000 music player (sadly Windows only player) that can analyze the dynamic range and loudness according to EBU standards.
foo_dr_meter: A simple Dynamic Range meter based on DR estimation formula published by https://dr.loudness-war.info/
foo_truepeak: ITU-R BS.1770-5 compliant True Peak scanner.
ReplayGain is part of the core components of foobar2000, so automatically adjusting the volume depending on the loudness of the trakc or entire album is pretty much a default feature of this player. The latter two components, especially the latter one give valuable insights into the loudness and mastering quality of a recording. True Peak can calculate the Peak-to-Integrated Loudness of a recording for example the headroom between loudest part and the maximum possible loudness of the format, or it tells you the loudness range in LUFS meaning how squished or wide the dynamic range of a track is. Really nifty if you have a huge music collection and need numbers to quickly compare releases.
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Yeah, I know a lot of indie artists. Most of that vinyl is produced straight off the 44.1/16 digital master. If you think it's analog (or in many cases even properly mastered at all), you're fooling yourself.
The "loudness war" issue is not inherent to digital sources. Nor is it something you need to "master the record out of". It's sufficient to not break it in the first place.
>44.1/16 digital
This is already way beyond what vinyl is able to reproduce. The best case is roughly 12-bits PCM equivalent. Literally not an issue in the slightest.
Exactly! Jeffrey Martin https://jeffreymartinportland.bandcamp.com/album/alive-july-... double LP on vinyl is a pleasure.
That's not true anymore. I've heard about complains about badly compressed vinyl releases by indie artists. Just a few days ago I came across a comment on discogs.com about this issue: https://www.discogs.com/release/37244526-April-VISTA-Traditi...
The issue is that vinyl mastering is a special case and different from digital mastering. You have to consider extra things like the width of the grooves, they can vary depending on the runtime of a side, this affects low frequencies as grooves might cut into each other and you'll get skips. And high frequencies degrade the closer you get towards the center of the record. I just think the people who can do this craft are simply retiring or dying out. This affects major label and indie artists alike.
This is mostly the result of a lot of vinyl factories having shut down due to vinyl becoming mostly irrelevant after the release of more convenient formats like the CD. At least irrelevant enough to make factories unsustainable. Most modern vinyls have extremely bad quality, I'd even go as far and say almost all freshly produced vinyls. Source: I've worked in a high end luxury HiFi store for years prior to getting into tech, selling turn tables, tube amps, speakers and basically whatever you can think off in that space.
I don't understand why they still release super compressed and loud masterings when most of the modern headphones are so good you don't really need to master for the old cheap stereo sets. And isn't headphones with Spotify the most common medium for music nowadays?
As a mixing engineer:
1. Compressed sound can be an integral (wanted) part of different genre aesthetics. I personally love dynamic mixes, but if you let your customers A/B mixes they will often chose the more compressed/louder one. If your song sounds weak after another bands song, that is an issue.
2. For reasons of health/liability there are maximum levels on headphones and mobile playback devices. That means if my mix has a high dynamic range the bulk of it may really just be too low when played back on the majority of headphones. If I mix my own music this is a bargain I can make if I mix other peoples music I would try to be a little more on the cautious side if the musicians didn't demand a highly dynamic mix.
3. Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music. 90% of people who listen to music do not listen to it actively, they just let it run in the background or are passively exposed to it. Try listening to a good dynamic recording of Beethovens fith in your car with the window rolled down. You will hear some strong phrases then inbetween nothing as it is below the ambient noise floor.
Vinyl has the benefit, that I as the mixing engineer can assume that the listener will be much more likely actively involved with the music than say in a radio mix.
And just wait until they find out that compressor/limiters came about for reasons other than shaping the dynamics of music. If you're not slammed against the wall, your AM broadcast signal isn't going far.
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Vinyl has the benefit that you can largely assume that it will NOT be listened to at all, cf. the studies showing that half of all vinyl buyers don’t even own a turntable.
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> 1 … they will often chose the more compressed/louder one
I’ve always been curious - but presumably that’s true even after volume matching?
> 3 Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music
I’ve heard this is also why film and video game soundtracks are often very compressed, even when orchestral, because they have to fit in the background with dialog/sfx
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It's much less of a problem than it used to be because streaming platforms normalize the tracks anyway so it's been fading away for a while now.
I don't know where you're getting this. For rock/pop music, it's as bad as it's ever been.
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All things being equal, the compressed tracks will still sound louder even after normalisation, unfortunately. I haven't seen any sign of dynamics returning to pop music since Spotify/YouTube.
Most headphones people actually use are crap. Yes you can buy studio monitors from sony. That isn't what people are listening to. They are using airpods which sound like earpods have always sounded: crap, absent lows, terrible separation. So you compress the hell out of the audio and make it loud so you can actually hear something with those headphones.
What AirPods are you talking about? The wired AirPods that sound pretty bad have been overtaken by wireless Bluetooth AirPods for many years now. The AirPod Pro 2 sound quality is a world of difference from the wired earbud style AirPods. In fact, most of the most popular TWS Bluetooth Earbuds have fantastic sound quality. The main issue with them is that they have a V shaped tuning, with various levels of bad. However, Apple and Samsung tunings are quite decent.
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And you can buy replacement ear pads - breathing new life in to $150 Sony Studio Monitor phones I bought 30 years ago...
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This is an absurd comment. Maybe you are just too young and ignorant to know what the average gear use to sound like.
Most people listen to music in their car. More compressed audio means less fiddling with the volume knob as you drive, regardless of normalization done by Spotify et al.
Anyhow that's my theory
Yep.
Most people aren't in a quiet environment when they listen to music these days. Compression helps significantly with this.
What would be neat would be to have a compression metadata 'guide' that would allow a compressor on-device to perform the compression, rather than baked into the audio track.
This would allow the user to tune 'severity' of compression. In a car / fancy headphones, you could sample the ambient noise level and adjust accordingly.
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> Most people listen to music in their car.
Most people don't have cars
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Compression can definitely help with that, but so can automating the volume knob. If it were just about keeping volume consistent, they would compress different tracks differently (which they do).
They overly compress the master channel specifically to make it very loud, and there's dozens of interviews with engineers that are frustrated with it.
There's still plenty of crappy headphones, as others have pointed out, but consider also listening from a phone's speaker, a cheap bluetooth speaker, with just one earbud/headphone on, etc.
Speaking of, I think the sound quality of modern-day bluetooth speakers is really good.
> I think the sound quality of modern-day bluetooth speakers is really good.
The sound quality out of the speakers of some Apple products seems borderline impossible to me. The MacBook in particular makes me feel like I missed an important DSP lecture at university.
People consistently perceive louder music as better quality. That's why volume matching is critical in any audio equipment testing.
The main reason vinyl often sounds better is because it is better mastered, so this is concerning.
That's just not true and vinyl doesn't sound better by any measure.
It's true from time to time. Low's last digital releases are actually unlistenable due to heavy-handed compression, but the vinyl seems to have been spared.
I had to record the vinyl to get usable digital files.
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It’s completely true, when the vinyl has a different mastering. It can be a completely different version. It’s not because it’s vinyl
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I'd say "rarely" instead of "often" though it depends on the genre I guess. There are also a lot of genres that can never sound as good on vinyl simply due to the lack of dynamic range/silence; mostly classical and electronic.
> There are also a lot of genres that can never sound as good on vinyl simply due to the
inability to encode very low tones.
I've been collecting physical music my whole life and there were times that I tried to get everything on CD, times I tried to get everything on vinyl, times I've tried to go fully digital, and the pattern I've fallen into now in my late 30s is buying music on whatever medium was popular when it came out.
I've now got a pretty mixed collection of records, tapes, CDs, digital music, and even a rockbox modded ipod. An added facet of fun for me when I find new music is to decide what the most thematically appropriate format to own it is.
For example I own the CD for Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay because there's a CD in the art, and it feels like a very 00s album, but for vaporwave I almost exclusively buy cassettes.
I like this idea, it's a bit like retro gaming with the original games/consoles/controllers instead of emulating things.
unsurprisingly I also have that as a hobby
I thought the loudness war was over? This was a hot topic for many years in the music production community. Sad to see it still persists. Especially since the answer to any loudness problem is to simply for the user to turn up the volume.
The loudness war in the strict "we must compress and slam everything as much as possible to make our stuff sound good on the radio" sense is over thanks to Spotify et al doing loudness normalization, but there's still an open question of "how much compression does sound good?" which is extremely subjective. A lot of modern music is louder than peak loudness war stuff just because the creators want their music to be slammed to shit. I listen to/make aggressive bass music and -5, -4, -3 LUFS are common. (By comparison, some of the common examples of loudness war era CDs like Definitely Maybe and Californication sit between -8 and -6 LUFS.)
> Especially since the answer to any loudness problem is to simply for the user to turn up the volume.
This isn't quite true as compression addresses differences in volume. Unless you expect the listener to actively turn up the volume during the quiet parts and down during the loud parts of your song, or be listening in a completely quiet environment with nothing but the music so they can appreciate the dynamics--which is the way a lot of vinyl aficionados do listen to music.
I've taken to buying SACDs when possible. The format supports higher dynamic range, but that barely matters. The mix is the bigger issue and SACD mixes are often better. Note you need an SACD player. And also note this only applies for playing on a proper HiFi or with good headphones at least. In your car, etc you probably want the compressed mix.
I vaguely recall reading about a double-blind test with the DSD stream from an SACD converted to 44.1kHz 16-bit PCM.
Even without proper dithering, listeners could not tell the difference between that and the SACD[1], but could tell the difference between that and the CD version of the same album.
If the mix is the bigger issue, why does the media format matter?
I read that as: SACD customers expect a better mix.
The format is only relevant in that it requires audiophile level dedication and money to use the format in the first place. Not dissimilar to vinyl before its recent boom.
I have an SACD setup, but for what I want to listen to, everything is out of print and secondary market is insane. Players can be found relatively cheaply at thrift stores (many don’t bluray and multi-CD carousels support it with digital output).
It's a weird social psychology quirk. For whatever reason, the entire music industry has been captured by the delusion that mixing all the sounds louder is good. No one likes it, except for those guys. For reasons I'll never understand, the movie industry has been captured by the opposite delusion; they're going to pump dynamic range so high that you can only understand about half the dialogue in the movie. And of course, no one likes this.
The full dynamic range is nice if you actually want to experience it and have a system capable of reproducing it. A dedicated center channel with a few hundred watts of amplification behind it will cut through the ambient backdrop like a hot knife through butter. You can watch Transformers or MI3 at reference volume with crystal clear dialogue if you're willing to throw enough power at the problem.
I've always set up my center channel volume using the test mode (by ear many years ago, and more recently automatically with Yamaha's YPAO).
Am I meant to then override that by increasing the center channel volume so it's louder than the other speakers?
Or raise the system volume?
What really would solve the movie issue is there was more standardised sound across different streaming services. Every single seems to have a different volume and compression / setup.
That and having an industry standard way to crank the center channel (user setting) when downmixing to 2.1
I have a decent[1] system with a dedicated center channel. Everybody complains that the mix is too loud if we tune for audible dialog on anything made in the past decade or so (MI3 bluray is fine, and I suspect that Transformers would be too).
1: Powered by a Denon AVR, not separates if you want to "No true cinephile" me.
remember when HN was saying "nobody wants big smartphones, why does the industry keep doing this? iPhone 4 size is the perfect size"
hint - the industry is doing EXACTLY what (most) consumers want. there is a big difference between what a consumer tells you they want, and what actually they pay for
There are probably 100 times more people listening to billboards hot 100 on crappy headphones if not phone speakers than people who know what "dynamic range" means…
Anecdotally, I have gotten many compliments on my small Unihertz phones that I've owned over the years, particularly from women.
As far as revealed preference goes, those who complimented me on it all had the smallest iPhone available when purchased.
Physical media is dying, so that's a strange conclusion to draw.
You're false. Research has shown that if people like sound A, they will like it even better when you play sound A louder.
The change in mixing and mastering can be largely explained by people changing the way they consume it. Eg. people watch more movies on netflix than in a cinema. People used to sit in a room with a record player, now they listen in their car or headphones while doing other stuff.
> No one likes it, except for those guys.
This is anecdotal at best; "those guys" will be using hard data just like tech bros with ecommerce sites do, and the data does not lie.
Compression sells better than high dynamic range else they would have stopped. This is true for every "nobody likes this" statement people make on the internet about things that are commercially successful nevertheless. Big phones (as someone else mentioned), mobile games, video game movie adaptations, AI music, Marvel franchise entries, funko pops, they're all running circles around people that don't personally like it and who are in circles of like-minded people.
Hard data can lead you astray.
When people listen to two pieces of audio they generally prefer the louder of the two. That doesn't mean they want you to turn up the volume dial for them. They can adjust the volume dial themselves, and if everything gets louder they'll turn down the volume dial to compensate.
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Are there any known ways to undo the compression? Assuming no clipping, the process should be reversible, right?
No, you need the original mix to remaster it yourself.
If you just amplify the whole track until its max amplitude reaches the medium's maximum, yes you could undo that.
But the loudness war aims to make the whole track even louder than that, by quietening those max peaks so they don't clip, then that gives you room to amplify the rest of the track even further. The dynamic range of the recording is permanently reduced.
people said "it's impossible to separate tracks (voice, bass, ...) after they are mixed". true in theory, but neural-networks can separate them in practice
same here, but there is no real market for somebody to bother yet
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"Assuming no clipping" is the biggest problem there, because the loudness wars resulted in a ton of very lossy clipping and similar artifacts. Arguably that sort of distortion became part of the expected sound, though, so just because it isn't reversible doesn't necessarily mean it is a problem.
In the open metadata world there is ReplayGain which analyzes music peaks and tries to create a negative gain to equalize the dynamic range to a standard volume at both the individual track and full album level.
Apple Music, Spotify, and others have proprietary but similar systems.
(As someone who deeply loves to shuffle an entire library, having a music player that supports ReplayGain has long been a personal requirement.)
ReplayGain sounds pretty cool. Does it pre analyse your library ?
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No, it's a destructive process. It's like trying to get back the original texture of wood after you've sanded it down. The best you're going to get is an approximation of what it might have been like.
There are tools to mitigate clipping artifacts, and tools to generate new transients for overly compressed files, but they're not a silver-bullet and the new material that is generated is more of a best guess than a true replacement for not over-compressing a mix in the first place.
These tools are most useful when used earlier in the process. Like when you just tracked an amazing vocal take, but the gain was too hot on one or two notes. The tools can mitigate some of the distortion artifacts to make it more usable. Applying these tools to complex material like a full mix will have some improvements, but at that stage there's less guarantee for convincing restoration of the record.
What I think non-professionals don't understand is that a record that is characterized by heavy compression is not something that happened at the very end with the mastering stage. It is an aesthetic choice that was made dozens of times along the way while recording, arranging, and mixing. Heavy compression is not necessarily a bad thing. Lots of amazing-sounding records harness it well. It's an art AND a craft. It takes audio engineers and producers years to do it well and with taste.
Short answer, no not really. It won’t ever be as good as a proper uncompressed mastering
you can use an expander or something more advanced like Ozone 12's Unlimiter. you still lose signal when you compress even if you're not clipping so it won't be perfect
Even without clipping (which loud mixes almost invariably have), you lose resolution; for digital it should be obvious that if you start with M distinct values and remap them to N distinct values, you can't reverse it if M>N (which it will be for compression).
For analog there are similar limitations, but it's limited by other factors like noise.
In electronic music we've been pressing the same DAT to vinyl and CD since the 90s. Subsequently replaced by .wav. Tracks come out of the DAW pretty loud these days, it's characteristic of the genre.
Do you think the removal of technical limitations re: the number of tracks & voices has introduced "loudness" as well in terms of more distinct sounds competing for the same sonic space?
It's crazy watching some of the producer YT videos now and they open up these projects with 105 tracks, multi-layered/multi-voice drums, etc.
They did that back in the reel to reel tape days too...it was just destructive. Songs could have tons of layers, but they had to bounce tracks down to stay within track limits for the final mix.
Queen's music is a massive pile of overdubs, especially for vocals and guitar. The Beatles also, and they were heavily into looping (physically cutting audio tape and gluing it in a loop, then re-recording it). Vocal and guitar double-tracking has also been the norm since the 50s, at least.
80s pop was also generally full of synthesizer stacks, where MIDI from one keyboard was simultaneously triggering several synths to create layers.
This makes sense as a huge part of the people who buy vinyl don't even own a record player. Or people buy special editions with colored vinyl, who would never play these records back anyway. If the main target demographic doesn't even notice bad mastering let alone have a clue what good mastering on any record would even sound like, what's the point? Vinyl has become a fashion accessory you buy as just another fan merch item.
> Here are samples from the original and remastered vinyl versions to compare the difference in sound rendering.
Where? The critical bit is missing!
Wayback Machine still has them:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260208100527/https://magicviny...
I mean it's inevitable that businesses will unify the pipelines. If there's profit in vinyl records, there's obviously more profit if you don't have to put any extra effort in.
The loudness war was never exclusive to digital audio formats though, it just reached saturation point [heh] with CDs. This didn't happen earlier because clipping isn't a thing on records -- saturation (practically some margin below that) is a hard limit.
Hard article to follow unfortunately. Also the only example it gives just shows a compressed waveform. I understand disliking that compared to the more dynamic older record, but a perfectly reasonable explanation for this would be: it sounds more like what buyers today expect.
>it sounds more like what buyers today expect
Is that really true? Anybody buying music today instead of streaming is somebody who takes music more seriously than most. It seems likely they're going to care more about sound quality than the streaming audience.
Is it true? No idea. It's plausible. My point was that one example of a heavily compressed track doesn't make a loudness war. I offered a plausible alternative explanation of the same facts. It seems likely that someone buying a mass market album today would expect it to sound pretty similar across all formats.
I don't know why you've introduced this 'serious' vs. streaming thing.
What does taking music more seriously even mean here? If you seriously like listening to normalised Purple Rain on 128 kbps mp3 and also like collecting physical media, you might seriously like to buy and listen to normalised Purple Rain on your preferred (lossless, or less-lossy) format.
The fix is to disqualify album of the year eligibility for anything showing evidence of severe clipping. The industry would rapidly shape itself up.
And who, exactly, would approve that misguided proposal?
I suspect you’re not involved in contemporary record making. Like it or not, clipping is a technique and a color that producers, mixers, and mastering engineers all choose to impart for aesthetic and technical reasons. It has it’s uses.
If your proposal were passed all that would be left for consideration would be a handful lame DSD jazz records from those hi-fi enthusiasts who are disconnected from the reality around how most records are made these days.
You might find it lame, but jazz has the highest share of physical media sales in the US
https://www.statista.com/chart/32863/genres-with-the-highest...
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RIAA is a standards body.
I thought that due to physical limits of the media that mfgs would avoid this temptation -looks like I’m way off.
Everybody is lazy nowadays and sends their ruined digital mixes out for everything. It's the production teams that need to fix their behavior.
What RIAA should do is promote universal use of ReplayGain across digital distribution platforms. That way people can manage relative volume as desired without the need to corrupt the audio. They could make money with a signed tag certifying the mix meets quality standards.
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This was literally the only reason vinyl made any sense.
Using "literally" doesn't make your comment factual; it's one reason, but also I just think they're neat.
That is, they're more collectible than CDs in my opinion. Bigger packaging for better artwork, something physical and relatively sturdy, etc.
Vinyl? Sturdy? Please.
I've been avoidant of most modern vinyl, I don't want to get a vinyl pressing of something that was digitally remastered. What's the point?
Why get a canvas print when you could put up a TV and display the picture digitally?
I'm guessing you're not a musician or studio worker, or I wasn't clear.
If I am using an analog device (in my case tube amplifier) I want to listen to something that was mastered on analog equipment. If it's square wave pressed on to vinyl you might as well stream.
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Because the TV wouldn't be as good a representation of the original painting as the canvas print would be. Similarly, vinyl wouldn't be as good a representation of the original sound as CDs would be.
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Great website!
Sorry, as cool as I find it from a mechanical perspective, I can never approve of vinyl.
From the perspective of an amateur DJ and dedicated dancer, vinyl never really died in the underground dance scene, whether talking about the UK dubscene or German techno.
And as much as I love and respect vinyl DJs, the medium itself is often used to make vinyl exclusive releases (looking at you UK), gatekeeping the music literally, make the runs limited and super exclusive, and obviously super expensive.
Not to mention it makes little sense, musically, to put a digitally produced track on an analog medium. Collecting old music on vinyl is one thing, getting all your new music (produced on Abelton) as vinyl is just silly to me. Again, completely understand why vinyl only DJs do it.
To me vinyl is totally contrary to the DIY culture of underground dance music, and I simply won't buy any new vinyl (not to say DJ culture is DIY, but techno culture for example really is at its core punk DIY).
I would much rather the producer just made a shirt instead of a special deluxe vinyl edition for the super fans with too much money (and the couple of vinyl only DJs that will buy it). I'd rather spend that money on more new music, that I can own as FLAC forever.
And I would REALLY like if all the old vinyls were professionally ripped and sold by their labels. Because sooner or later they WILL all disappear, which I guess if you're a collector/secretive DJ is a good thing... Really shocking that a lot of this old music can only be found in good quality on Youtube rips. Yes, better than if you were able to dig out a 30 year old record in a store.
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