Yeah, loudness war is a plague, but vinyl and CD differences have nothing to do with it; it's just incompetent producers and sound engineers aiming at making their work more loud to attract listeners.
I miss vinyl records for only one thing: big sleeves and their art.
Big sleeves and art, but for me it’s the ceremony. I just love taking that time to really appreciate what you’re about to listen to. Filtering along the spines and having something jump out that grabs you and you know it’s the album for now.
Yeah, there’s probably a compromise in quality, but for me the experience is just better.
I miss my vinyl collection a lot. Really wish it was easier to ship it to the other side of the world but I’ve struggled to find a way.
Some people actually like "Material objects". I personally do. A well made tool, nice suit, a nice pen and piece of paper a leather lounge, and of course a nicely printed record cover and the feeling of loading the thing in the player.
I think society has lost a bit of that with digital stuff.
Video games used to come in these big, thick cardboard boxes with elaborate art. Inside it was a thick manual, a quick fact sheet or two, and the game itself in a proper jewel case.
You bet I wouldn't mind paying full price for that.
RPGs would also often come with world maps, sometimes on cloth. Some games also came with amazing reference guides. Red Baron (1990) iirc had a spiral bound guide with information on ww1 fighter tactics and schematics of all the planes in the game.
plus: no logins, no algorithms, no endless random play until end of time, no ads, no tracking, no buggy pairings, no subscriptions, no DRM, no licensing issues.
Recently a bar I frequent had some issues with their Internet connection for a few days: low speed, drops and a total black out. Usually they are playing music from some internet services, which wasn't an option at this time, of course. But they do have a vinyl setup and enough records to go by while waiting for the connection to be repaired.
I grew up in cassette tape era, but they shared a characteristic with vinyl: albums had 2 sides, providing a "break" or "intermission" between sides. Many artists would purposely arrange the songs on an album to account for the break in the middle, or group sets of similar songs on the same side (I receall several Duran Duran albums having the radio friendly singles on side 1, and the more ethereal, experimental-sounding songs on side 2).
I remember getting the albums out of the sleeves, then the paper inner sleeve. Then spraying shooting my discwasher with an anti-static gun. I think there was a special deionized water you could drip on it too. Then you would clean around the disk and put it on the turntable. I had an automatic turntable, I wasn't into dropping the needle on the disk by hand.
> Yeah, loudness war is a plague, but vinyl and CD differences have nothing to do with it; it's just incompetent producers and sound engineers aiming at making their work more loud to attract listeners.
The claim (not directly made by the article, but generally made to support the difference) is that vinyl’s physical characteristics limit how “loud” a recording can be. Specifically, that a vinyl pressing of a “brick walled” recording becomes unplayable—or at least unreliably playable—because its physical tracks are insufficient to keep a stylus in place for playback.
I don’t know how true that claim is, but the analysis seems cromulent, and analysis of comparable media seems to support it well enough.
It isn’t a claim that pressing vinyl attracts or requires better production etc, but that the medium has inherent physical constraints that benefit, at least as a side effect, from greater dynamic range.
It's quite true. Vinyl mastering is very different from digital, or even mastering for tape or other analog formats. Sibilance is terrifying in vinyl mastering. The properties of different groove lengths influence track order on albums because tolerances are different on the outer end of the record than the inner end, and you can squeeze out more fidelity by sacrificing duration with wider grooves.
There are a few general tricks here: https://www.sageaudio.com/articles/how-to-master-for-vinyl but in practice there are so many variables that vinyl mastering engineers are worth their weight in gold, and there's some significant investment made in trying to automate most of all of it algorithmically or via ML/AI.
Vinyl records employ RIAA equalization [1] to attenuate the bass when mastering. As mentioned, this is to keep the needle from literally jumping out of the groove during playback of low frequencies. A phono-preamp is generally the way you reverse the RIAA equalization, recover the bass, when listening.
There are a lot of 'old school' edm records in online stores that were redigitized from vinyl, and you can tell just looking at the wave forms the difference in how they were mastered, and they sound noticeably _worse_ than modern EDM records, with much less powerful bass. It's actually sort of interesting how they worked around that with more dynamics in older records to make the bass pop more, but I'm not sure that it's better over all, it's just different.
Try to make a sine wave at E very loud and boomy on a Vinyl record. Techno is notorious for being difficult to print right, but entirely possible when one knows what they're doing. Mono, phase cancellation issues, yadda yada. When you get to 40 Hz apparently the needle will hop into lanes it shouldn't track on.
A friend had a vinyl copy of The 1812 Overture. At the point where the cannons started firing, they increased the groove spacing to allow the full dynamic range. Unfortunately, you could see where my friend's needle had taken shortcuts across the biggest transients.
Idk if it’s true but supposedly in the the Telarc recording, the cannon fire went down to like 7Hz and would blow out your speakers if the signal wasn’t filtered.
With things like 1812 one of the problems was not always recognized back when vinyl was king.
The recording can be so realistic it captures the actual earth moving along with the heavier-than-normal sound waves hitting the microphones.
The bigger speakers and higher power amplifiers were always favored to reproduce the shock waves, and that's what happened.
It was the speakers' high volume not the smallness of the micro-groove that pushed the needle off the record and it emphasized the need for far better isolation of the turntable during the reproduction process than was needed for the microphone during the recording process.
A well calibrated turntable pickup/arm will not jump until you turn it up past a certain point, but that point is much lower when it's the 1812 Overture, and you don't really need an audiophile setup to shake things when the source material captures that to begin with.
OTOH with radio-friendly pop music a dancer or two in an upstairs room could make the needle jump to the next song on the disc :(
> but vinyl and CD differences have nothing to do with it; it's just incompetent producers and sound engineers aiming at making their work more loud to attract listeners.
The physical limitations of vinyl don't allow it to be pushed as hard as a digital medium, or even tape, can be.
It's kind of like making a road that only allows air-cooled VWs and noting that speeding drops to almost zero.
> I miss vinyl records for only one thing: big sleeves and their art.
I had a copy of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk". Double-album in a hinged sleeve, with each album having an inner sleeve. That gave eight big surfaces for art, and they certainly used it. Lovely.
>but vinyl and CD differences have nothing to do with it
The kind of do. With vinyl if you master like this you're making the grooves (the paths where the needle runs in) more pronounced, meaning less space for music (which is a premium in CDs compared to streaming, and even more so to vinyl compared to CDs: many vinyl "double albums" could have beeen a single CD). And it can make the needle jump around or have issues too.
So vinyl kind of forces you to master with actual dynamics, as opposed to squashing everything.
If they do it, they are not "incompetent"; it's just that is what people want/expect. You cannot afford to be the quiet piece after an ultra-powwah one when on radio on streaming....
It's been happening for a long time. Back when one had to rip CDs I was surprised by how many recordings clipped. It wasn't just pop, good classical studios like Deutshe Gramaphon also did it.
If everybody went for vinyl, they'd bring the loudness war over as far as it's possible (the medium is more limited).
Right now, sound engineers, not incompetent at all, optimize CDs for the CD audience (and for the most part, they preferentially buy "louder," even if they'd deny it if you ask) and vinyl for those freaks who maintain their diamond needle.
So vinyl sounds better _because_ it's a hipster medium.
I miss vinyl records for only one thing: big sleeves and their art.