[crmd]

One of the non-obvious reasons vinyl albums often sound better than their digital counterparts is that the mastering process for cutting vinyl is extremely “hands on” and is typically performed by senior mastering engineers working with top of the line equipment. The very act of having an old set of ears listening critically to each track, and making subtle changes like shelving equalization, surgical multiband compression, and stereo width reduction in the low end (to keep the needle from bouncing), will often improve the sound of an album before it’s even sent to the vinyl cutting machine.

[ubermonkey]

This is underacknowledged.

A bunch of early CD pressings were pretty bad, because they just issued CDs with the mastered-for-vinyl recordings without considering how the medium affected playback.

Fortunately this mostly got resolved in the first 10-15 years of CD; I think the last domino (at least for people my age) was when the first Zeppelin box set finally dropped. Listening to those tracks was stunning -- the new remastered discs sounded SO MUCH BETTER than the original mid-80s CDs we'd all had previously.