[usrusr]

The mixes are optimized to a different set of constraints. (Or they should be, chances are much of the collectibles for modern music are just bad vinyl pressings of the mix for digital.) It's not "more careful mixes", the digital one will likely have seen just as much care or more, but the analog one can strike compromises between dynamics and minor distortion that the digital simply can't. Because all digital distortion is major distortion and avoided at all costs. That's why the mix for digital usually throws far more dynamics under the bus to achieve loudness than the mix for analog.

A CD version of the vinyl mix would sound great, but you'd be surprised how silent it is if you leave your amp at the usual setting.

[worrycue]

> The mixes are optimized to a different set of constraints.

From what I heard, a lot of vinyls are just recorded from CD. No source, just a YouTube video a long time ago so take it with a grain of salt.

> Because all digital distortion is major distortion and avoided at all costs.

Not a signal processing expert but from what I read, all the quantization noise is pushed into the >20kHz frequencies where it can't be heard via dithering/noise shaping.

Loudness/compression is a deliberate choice and has nothing to do with noise.

[usrusr]

What i meant with digital distortion is what happens when your levels leave the good regions: on vinyl, the resulting distortion will gently ramp in. The medium keeps representing those higher levels, just not very well. A good vinyl mix will consider allowing some of that the lesser evil over achieving the same amount of general loudness with more dynamics compression.

The clipping you'd get in the digital realm however isn't gentle or subtle at all and the levels beyond the good range simply don't exist. That's a hard no-go.

Quantization noise is an entirely different non-beast. Loudness/compression has everything to do with it. Yes, sometimes ccompression is also employed as an intentional creative element, but that's not even the tip of the ice berg.

I do agree with the suspicion that many vinyl pressings these days are just pressings of the CD mix. But this has everything to do with business and nothing with technology. It's a shame that back when the industry went through that phase of experimenting with formats beyond 2x16@44.1, they did not do a multichannel format with one stereo pair holding the loudness-optimized mix for radio, driving and the like, and another pair shifted 48dB lower to add more headroom. (or 24dB, to allow half of the additional bits of a 16 -> 24 expansion to go to where people usually expect it)

[worrycue]

As mentioned I’m not an expert but what kind of distortions can there be in properly mastered 16 bit 44.1kHz PCM? I know there is distortion from quantisation but that’s a solved problem with dithering and noise shaping, no?

Clipping is just bad mastering, no?

I also find it hard to believe that vinyl will have less distortion as it’s analog where physical imperfections in the medium will affect the sound far more than in the case of digital mediums like CDs - with the latter it’s either a 1 or a 0; as long as wear and tear / damage doesn’t flip a 1 to a 0 or vice versa, you are good (and even if you do get a flip, ECC will normally fix it).

Vinyl also has it own set of restrictions with the frequencies it can reproduce and dynamic range since it’s all encode physically as tiny groves with bumps on the vinyl.

[usrusr]

Yeah, clipping is bad mastering. But you'd be surprised what happens when you simply reduce levels to the point where the odd freak wave outlier does not clip. People mock the loudness wars, but the amount of effective volume you'd get after naive "just make it not clip" mastering would be too low for even the loudest loudness decriers.

Levels on vinyl don't have a clear maximum beyond which the levels are cleanly clipped: they keep going, just not as good. It's more like the red zone on an engine's rpm, you wouldn't want to operate up there for prolonged periods, but a race driverwho never ever dipped the needle in there for even the shortest time wouldn't be good at their job. A good CD mix will achieve target loudness exclusively by dynamics compression, a good vinyl mix can achieve the same with a mix of noticeably less compression and the occasional flirt with the red zone.

[worrycue]

Personally I would file the loudness wars under bad mastering too.

Properly mastered CD audio is the near the best audio you can get as a consumer - you have 24 bit 96kHz audio but that's really overkill as the noise floor with 16 bits is already very very low even without noise shaping dither.

Vinyl as an audio storage medium I honestly don't see the appeal. Noisy, lower dynamic range than CD, low durability and longevity, ... etc.

[chiph]

> Loudness/compression is a deliberate choice and has nothing to do with noise.

Agree. Personally I find the amount of compression used in many of today's releases highly objectionable. I'm a big Duran Duran fan, and was really looking forward to listening to "Future Past" in 2021 after pre-ordering it. But within a minute into it I thought there was something wrong with my headphones. Turns out they compressed the hell out of it - the album is unlistenable, even in a car going down the road.

The large amount of compression is commonly known as the Loudness War:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war