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by criddell 13 days ago
The tactile experience is one thing, but if you are bothered by the heavy use of compression on CDs (the loudness wars), then vinyl might sound better to you.

Now that people aren't listening to CDs in the car, it would be amazing to see some remasters of CDs with the dynamic compression dialed back a bit.
2 comments
mypalmike 12 days ago
This type of remastering (and remixing) has been happening for a while now. Lots of newer releases of classic albums of the CD era have remasters with less compression. Pretty Hate Machine, American Idiot, Absolution (Muse)…
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jonhohle 12 days ago
PHM was released before the loudness war. I’ve actually read the opposite about the 2010 remaster. Significantly more compression making all the layers (one of the hallmarks of NIN) inaudible. I’ve listened to the 2010 version, but never felt anything wrong with the original. Fortunately, the original is extremely easy to find and usually very cheap, for comparison.
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mypalmike 12 days ago
True, PHM was not the best example.
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BoingBoomTschak 13 days ago
You seem to be stating a general rule when this concerns only a very small amount of cases (not the loudness war itself, but when the vinyl uses a different and drastically better master) that's also quite dependent on genre.

And omit that a lot of music sounds a lot worse on vinyl due to its lack of dynamic range and poor LF capabilities (classical, electronic). This isn't for nothing that the first recording pressed on CD was a rendition of the Alpensinfonie.

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criddell 12 days ago
> You seem to be stating a general rule

I was trying not to. I thought saying "it might sound better to you" would make it clear that it's a subjective matter of taste.

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BoingBoomTschak 11 days ago
I meant "general" with regards to the material, not the listener.

I have myself digitized a few rare cases like Celtic Frost's Monotheist because the CD was horrid and I know pop and rock suffered much more from the phenomenon, but unless the music was released first as a vinyl then got later butchered on CD (so before '85~88), it's very rare to have a situation where the vinyl is objectively better.

One such case I encountered was Unknown Pleasures (https://world-playground-deceit.net/blog/2025/11/music-revie...) but I finally found a CD worth the change. Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode were also bands that gave me much trouble when navigating their haphazard CD master landscape.

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