[TheOtherHobbes]

Vinyl literally has less than half the dynamic range of CD and has always been compressed before cutting.

Hard limiting is a (stupid) choice, but some limiting has always been necessary.

The "warm vinyl sound" is basically analog compression with added low-end distortion from the RIAA compensation and some wrinkles at the high end caused by stylus resonance.

[breezybottom]

Which is why it's so bizarre that CDs are generally less dynamic than vinyl. There's no technical reason that should be the case.

[functionmouse]

CDs were most commonly played in cars on the loud highway

[mancerayder]

Says who? I remember having one of those cassette adapters that was a tape that you'd stick in the tape drive, and you'd attach to the headphone jack of a portable CD player. Maybe I was poor, but cars had cassettes most of my youth, while people had CD players at home.

[bbatha]

Exactly cd players in cars didn’t become common until the 2000s when anti skip became common place.

[breezybottom]

That's a good point. CD mastering was very dynamic until around the mid-90s, and that probably correlates with CD players becoming a standard option in cars.

[CarlitosHighway]

Seems very US tunnel vision. Source for this unspecific claim?

[aidenn0]

And the first CD player I saw in a car had a button to apply dynamic range compression.

[kkkqkqkqkqlqlql]

You know, there are more countries than the US.

[antonvs]

You should try spending some time in the US, to discover just how irrelevant that is to most USians. It's an eye-opening level of parochialism.

[mixmastamyk]

Huh? CDs are a poor fit in cars to the point that the ten disc changer in the trunk was a thing. To avoid the inevitable damage from swapping them.

[mjr00]

Now, yes, but in the 90s/00s the alternative to CDs was cassette tapes, which were both inferior audio quality and took up more space. CD players in cars were a very desirable feature back then.

At my peak in the mid-00s I remember counting and finding I had just over 500 CDs in my car, almost all of which were MP3s burnt to playable CD-Rs laying in the passenger seat... the good old days. Nice thing about using CD-Rs is you didn't have to care about them getting scratched, either.

[ssl-3]

Cassettes were great, though. They could pile up, unprotected, in the center console or find their way under the seat and be fine. That pile might have everything from your mom's Vivaldi tape to the MC5 bootleg you got from your older brother.

Sick of listening to whatever's in the deck right now?

Just rummage through them without looking using the gear-shift hand and hold one up in an instant without taking eyes very far off the road. Upon finding one that's Good Enough For Right Now: Pop the old one out of the tape player with a ker-chunk and a blast of radio noise, and then quickly plunge its replacement into the empty hole -- all with muscle memory.

Frozen mist on the windshield on a cold morning? There's a cassette-shaped ice scraper right there in the dash. Take it out, use it to scrape the ice off the window, and put it back in. It still works.

CD-Rs helped a ton and I deliberately avoided CDs in cars until I was able to make CDs cheaply at home. But they were still delicate things in ways that tapes never were, they still skipped in ways that tapes never did, and their sonic improvements weren't very meaningful over the wind and road noise with the factory stereo of a malaise-era Chevrolet.

[functionmouse]

> and be fine.

lolno those things were a finicky failure prone analog nightmare.

[functionmouse]

alternatively, there was such a market desire for CDs in the car that the ten disc changer in the trunk was a thing.

[mixmastamyk]

They were never good in the car, merely tolerable without option. Early on they skipped, and they were always bigger than cassettes, more expensive, and significantly more fragile. The changer made them very expensive to boot.

Why most CD listening was done in the home, and cassettes held on for longer than expected.

[vel0city]

Right? Why didn't we think to just use Android Auto or Carplay in the 90s/2000s. We were all such idiots back then.

[topranks]

There is, see my other reply.

CDs are able to store much louder tracks than can be cut on a record. The technical reason things on CD got louder is because they could.

[basisword]

The dynamic range of the format isn't the issue though, it's the mastering. CD mastering largely pushed volume at the expense of dynamic range (part of the reason we see endless remasters these days). Vinyl doesn't automatically mean a better master but older stuff is much less compressed.

[pier25]

> Vinyl literally has less than half the dynamic range of CD

A lot less than half.

It's around 20-30db and every 10db is a factor of 10. The CD has between 100-1000x more dynamic range.

[pineaux]

That is a false way of saying it. Because then you are unpacking what dBs are, which is fascinating, but not how humans perceive sound. We use dBs exactly because it approaches human experience of sound better (although still shitty) than sound pressure would. A better logarithmic system would use base 2, I think phons tried to popularize that, but signal processing calculation with a base 2 log is less convenient than a base 10 log. So I think that is the reason.

For who wants to know: sound perception doubles every 10dB so. 30db of dynamic range is about 8 times as much dynamic range from the perceptual perspective.

[pier25]

> That is a false way of saying it

As an audio engineer I'm well aware of how decibels work and why we use them.

You're talking about subjective perception but I'm talking about objective measurements.

[killerstorm]

Objectively we care about the amount of information in the signal, not air movement. Air movement is just a medium which conveys information. It's not just "subjective perception", it's the meaning of the process.

[pier25]

I'm stating an objective measurable fact not arguing about semantics or meaning, whatever that is for you.

[jmalicki]

They're all objective, just different coordinate systems. There's nothing less objective about a different coordinate transform.

[idiotsecant]

This whole thread is about subjective perception, other than yours

[pier25]

That's your interpretation.

When someone claims that vinyl has less than half the DR of a CD then I think it's important to clarify how big of a difference it actually is. I would imagine HN would care about 16bits vs aprox 10bits of dynamic range.

[idiotsecant]

Pedantry isn't interesting.

[topranks]

CD has better dynamic range, sure. But a CD is also able to represent a signal with _much less dynamic range_ than it’s possible to cut on a record.

It was the move to digital that facilitated the loudness war.

In modern years it’s been fairly common for masters to vinyl to be less compressed than the CD release, for the simple reason vinyl has more limitations.

[hulitu]

> Vinyl literally has less than half the dynamic range of CD

In theory, yes. In practice it depends on the "loudness".