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.

Also covered by Tech Radar (2025) -- You need to be careful when buying new vinyl – the digital music loudness war can mean they sound worse than second-hand records: https://www.techradar.com/audio/turntables/you-need-to-be-ca...

Depending on which vinyl you're talking about. I care very little about big names signed to big corpo - they can do whatever they want to their vinyl. There are plenty of indi/underground artists releasing both on vinyl and tampe, who succumbed to nothing, but are alive and well actually. Check bandcamp more often for clues, should you disagree.

I thought the loudness war was over? This was a hot topic for many years in the music production community. Sad to see it still persists. Especially since the answer to any loudness problem is to simply for the user to turn up the volume.

I don't understand why they still release super compressed and loud masterings when most of the modern headphones are so good you don't really need to master for the old cheap stereo sets. And isn't headphones with Spotify the most common medium for music nowadays?

I've been collecting physical music my whole life and there were times that I tried to get everything on CD, times I tried to get everything on vinyl, times I've tried to go fully digital, and the pattern I've fallen into now in my late 30s is buying music on whatever medium was popular when it came out.

I've now got a pretty mixed collection of records, tapes, CDs, digital music, and even a rockbox modded ipod. An added facet of fun for me when I find new music is to decide what the most thematically appropriate format to own it is.

For example I own the CD for Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay because there's a CD in the art, and it feels like a very 00s album, but for vaporwave I almost exclusively buy cassettes.

I've taken to buying SACDs when possible. The format supports higher dynamic range, but that barely matters. The mix is the bigger issue and SACD mixes are often better. Note you need an SACD player. And also note this only applies for playing on a proper HiFi or with good headphones at least. In your car, etc you probably want the compressed mix.

The main reason vinyl often sounds better is because it is better mastered, so this is concerning.

It's a weird social psychology quirk. For whatever reason, the entire music industry has been captured by the delusion that mixing all the sounds louder is good. No one likes it, except for those guys. For reasons I'll never understand, the movie industry has been captured by the opposite delusion; they're going to pump dynamic range so high that you can only understand about half the dialogue in the movie. And of course, no one likes this.

In electronic music we've been pressing the same DAT to vinyl and CD since the 90s. Subsequently replaced by .wav. Tracks come out of the DAW pretty loud these days, it's characteristic of the genre.

Are there any known ways to undo the compression? Assuming no clipping, the process should be reversible, right?

> Here are samples from the original and remastered vinyl versions to compare the difference in sound rendering.

Where? The critical bit is missing!

I mean it's inevitable that businesses will unify the pipelines. If there's profit in vinyl records, there's obviously more profit if you don't have to put any extra effort in.

The loudness war was never exclusive to digital audio formats though, it just reached saturation point [heh] with CDs. This didn't happen earlier because clipping isn't a thing on records -- saturation (practically some margin below that) is a hard limit.

Hard article to follow unfortunately. Also the only example it gives just shows a compressed waveform. I understand disliking that compared to the more dynamic older record, but a perfectly reasonable explanation for this would be: it sounds more like what buyers today expect.

The fix is to disqualify album of the year eligibility for anything showing evidence of severe clipping. The industry would rapidly shape itself up.

This was literally the only reason vinyl made any sense.

Great website!

This makes sense as a huge part of the people who buy vinyl don't even own a record player. Or people buy special editions with colored vinyl, who would never play these records back anyway. If the main target demographic doesn't even notice bad mastering let alone have a clue what good mastering on any record would even sound like, what's the point? Vinyl has become a fashion accessory you buy as just another fan merch item.

I've been avoidant of most modern vinyl, I don't want to get a vinyl pressing of something that was digitally remastered. What's the point?

Sorry, as cool as I find it from a mechanical perspective, I can never approve of vinyl.

From the perspective of an amateur DJ and dedicated dancer, vinyl never really died in the underground dance scene, whether talking about the UK dubscene or German techno.

And as much as I love and respect vinyl DJs, the medium itself is often used to make vinyl exclusive releases (looking at you UK), gatekeeping the music literally, make the runs limited and super exclusive, and obviously super expensive.

Not to mention it makes little sense, musically, to put a digitally produced track on an analog medium. Collecting old music on vinyl is one thing, getting all your new music (produced on Abelton) as vinyl is just silly to me. Again, completely understand why vinyl only DJs do it.

To me vinyl is totally contrary to the DIY culture of underground dance music, and I simply won't buy any new vinyl (not to say DJ culture is DIY, but techno culture for example really is at its core punk DIY).

I would much rather the producer just made a shirt instead of a special deluxe vinyl edition for the super fans with too much money (and the couple of vinyl only DJs that will buy it). I'd rather spend that money on more new music, that I can own as FLAC forever.

And I would REALLY like if all the old vinyls were professionally ripped and sold by their labels. Because sooner or later they WILL all disappear, which I guess if you're a collector/secretive DJ is a good thing... Really shocking that a lot of this old music can only be found in good quality on Youtube rips. Yes, better than if you were able to dig out a 30 year old record in a store.