Comment by TheOtherHobbes
3 days ago
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
Says who? I remember having one of those cassette adapters that was a tape that you'd stick in the tape drive, and you'd attach to the headphone jack of a portable CD player. Maybe I was poor, but cars had cassettes most of my youth, while people had CD players at home.
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That's a good point. CD mastering was very dynamic until around the mid-90s, and that probably correlates with CD players becoming a standard option in cars.
Seems very US tunnel vision. Source for this unspecific claim?
And the first CD player I saw in a car had a button to apply dynamic range compression.
Huh? CDs are a poor fit in cars to the point that the ten disc changer in the trunk was a thing. To avoid the inevitable damage from swapping them.
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You know, there are more countries than the US.
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.
> That is a false way of saying it
As an audio engineer I'm well aware of how decibels work and why we use them.
You're talking about subjective perception but I'm talking about objective measurements.
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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".