[disantlor]

thats not a great argument because often the master for a vinyl record is different (crucially, less hyped and compressed) to even be cuttable on vinyl. thus the final product actually can sound better in some cases (not all), not directly because of the vinyl playback but the production processes leading up to that.

[lukas099]

Are you sure? I thought the limitations of vinyl required music to be compressed, but that was not true for digital.

Back in the day music was definitely less compressed, but I thought that was more due to different mixing philosophies.

[kalleboo]

Vinyl requires compression within a certain range - too little or too much is no good.

Digital allows for far higher compression - historically digital released have been compressed to hell into a "brick" with very little actual dynamic range. This is so that when they're played on radio they're going to sound louder than anything else. Vinyl doesn't allow for this same amount of compression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Modern streaming services will recompress songs to a common standard, negating all of the loudness war stuff, but I haven't looked at new releases to see if heavy compression is still common practice on the master releases but I'd assume they still do it because practices change slowly. In that case they're just throwing away bit depth for no reason.

[chuchana]

> Modern streaming services will recompress songs to a common standard, negating all of the loudness war stuff, but I haven't looked at new releases to see if heavy compression is still common practice on the master releases but I'd assume they still do it because practices change slowly.

I assume good mastering engineers create dedicated masters for each major streaming service because of their different requirements.

[lukas099]

Interesting reply, thanks.

[enneff]

If you like the sound of a higher noise floor and less dynamic range then vinyl might sound better to you. I’m not being facetious, some people genuinely prefer the sound of records.