[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.