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 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?
Most people listen to music in their car. More compressed audio means less fiddling with the volume knob as you drive, regardless of normalization done by Spotify et al.
Most people aren't in a quiet environment when they listen to music these days. Compression helps significantly with this.
What would be neat would be to have a compression metadata 'guide' that would allow a compressor on-device to perform the compression, rather than baked into the audio track.
This would allow the user to tune 'severity' of compression. In a car / fancy headphones, you could sample the ambient noise level and adjust accordingly.
Most headphones people actually use are crap. Yes you can buy studio monitors from sony. That isn't what people are listening to. They are using airpods which sound like earpods have always sounded: crap, absent lows, terrible separation. So you compress the hell out of the audio and make it loud so you can actually hear something with those headphones.
What AirPods are you talking about? The wired AirPods that sound pretty bad have been overtaken by wireless Bluetooth AirPods for many years now. The AirPod Pro 2 sound quality is a world of difference from the wired earbud style AirPods. In fact, most of the most popular TWS Bluetooth Earbuds have fantastic sound quality. The main issue with them is that they have a V shaped tuning, with various levels of bad. However, Apple and Samsung tunings are quite decent.
All of them, compared to over ear monitors. You can't out engineer physics advantages of a larger speaker. Airpods fall short of other in ear monitors too fwiw, so they are a poor choice in class.
Physics doesn't prevent reproduction of bass in IEMs. Thanks to inverse square scaling of sound pressure with distance, putting the driver within the ear canal greatly reduces the required output level to the point where even tiny drivers can handle it. Lots of IEMs can reproduce loud, deep bass with low distortion.
You of course miss the whole-body tactile vibration effect of loud bass played on speakers, but the sound itself is there.
Those things you can tear open and re wire yourself if you really needed. Ship of Theseus mdr7506 is possible. Meanwhile how long do those airpod batteries last before you need to pay apples pizzo for replacement you can't do yourself? Some people say only like what 2 years or so. Rich coming from the company that no longer ships chargers due to ewaste concerns.
1. Compressed sound can be an integral (wanted) part of different genre aesthetics. I personally love dynamic mixes, but if you let your customers A/B mixes they will often chose the more compressed/louder one. If your song sounds weak after another bands song, that is an issue.
2. For reasons of health/liability there are maximum levels on headphones and mobile playback devices. That means if my mix has a high dynamic range the bulk of it may really just be too low when played back on the majority of headphones. If I mix my own music this is a bargain I can make if I mix other peoples music I would try to be a little more on the cautious side if the musicians didn't demand a highly dynamic mix.
3. Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music. 90% of people who listen to music do not listen to it actively, they just let it run in the background or are passively exposed to it. Try listening to a good dynamic recording of Beethovens fith in your car with the window rolled down. You will hear some strong phrases then inbetween nothing as it is below the ambient noise floor.
Vinyl has the benefit, that I as the mixing engineer can assume that the listener will be much more likely actively involved with the music than say in a radio mix.
And just wait until they find out that compressor/limiters came about for reasons other than shaping the dynamics of music. If you're not slammed against the wall, your AM broadcast signal isn't going far.
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.
The full dynamic range is nice if you actually want to experience it and have a system capable of reproducing it. A dedicated center channel with a few hundred watts of amplification behind it will cut through the ambient backdrop like a hot knife through butter. You can watch Transformers or MI3 at reference volume with crystal clear dialogue if you're willing to throw enough power at the problem.
What really would solve the movie issue is there was more standardised sound across different streaming services. Every single seems to have a different volume and compression / setup.
That and having an industry standard way to crank the center channel (user setting) when downmixing to 2.1
It's true from time to time. Low's last digital releases are actually unlistenable due to heavy-handed compression, but the vinyl seems to have been spared.
I had to record the vinyl to get usable digital files.
The loudness and compression on Low's last couple of albums is very much deliberate, so it's surprising that the vinyl doesn't have it. Though I heard similar claims about Sleater-Kinney's The Woods, which was also intensely compressed for artistic effect.
The reason it was backed off for the vinyl master is most likely due to physical limitations of the medium. If the audio channels are too loud (wide) there is risk that the needle will jump out of the groove.
There's compression and distortion for sure on the vinyl, but when you look at the waveform on the digital it's right up to the max. It completely changes the sound.
I'd say "rarely" instead of "often" though it depends on the genre I guess. There are also a lot of genres that can never sound as good on vinyl simply due to the lack of dynamic range/silence; mostly classical and electronic.
No, you need the original mix to remaster it yourself.
If you just amplify the whole track until its max amplitude reaches the medium's maximum, yes you could undo that.
But the loudness war aims to make the whole track even louder than that, by quietening those max peaks so they don't clip, then that gives you room to amplify the rest of the track even further. The dynamic range of the recording is permanently reduced.
"Assuming no clipping" is the biggest problem there, because the loudness wars resulted in a ton of very lossy clipping and similar artifacts. Arguably that sort of distortion became part of the expected sound, though, so just because it isn't reversible doesn't necessarily mean it is a problem.
In the open metadata world there is ReplayGain which analyzes music peaks and tries to create a negative gain to equalize the dynamic range to a standard volume at both the individual track and full album level.
Apple Music, Spotify, and others have proprietary but similar systems.
(As someone who deeply loves to shuffle an entire library, having a music player that supports ReplayGain has long been a personal requirement.)
you can use an expander or something more advanced like Ozone 12's Unlimiter. you still lose signal when you compress even if you're not clipping so it won't be perfect
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.
Is that really true? Anybody buying music today instead of streaming is somebody who takes music more seriously than most. It seems likely they're going to care more about sound quality than the streaming audience.
And who, exactly, would approve that misguided proposal?
I suspect you’re not involved in contemporary record making. Like it or not, clipping is a technique and a color that producers, mixers, and mastering engineers all choose to impart for aesthetic and technical reasons. It has it’s uses.
If your proposal were passed all that would be left for consideration would be a handful lame DSD jazz records from those hi-fi enthusiasts who are disconnected from the reality around how most records are made these days.
Everybody is lazy nowadays and sends their ruined digital mixes out for everything. It's the production teams that need to fix their behavior.
What RIAA should do is promote universal use of ReplayGain across digital distribution platforms. That way people can manage relative volume as desired without the need to corrupt the audio. They could make money with a signed tag certifying the mix meets quality standards.
The modern equivalent of ReplayGain, EBU R 128, is already ubiquitous in the industry. People brickwall records anyway, presumably because more people are likely to complain about being unable to hear the quiet parts in their car, or about their phone speaker not being able to play it loud enough, than about the whole thing sounding squashed.
The ideal solution would be to distribute high dynamic range audio with metadata to configure optional playback-time dynamic range compression for noisy listening environments or weak playback equipment.
I'm guessing you're not a musician or studio worker, or I wasn't clear.
If I am using an analog device (in my case tube amplifier) I want to listen to something that was mastered on analog equipment. If it's square wave pressed on to vinyl you might as well stream.
You should save the exaggerated euphemisms for your audiophile subreddits. "square waves pressed on to vinyl" just proves you have no clue of the physics to an HN audience.
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.
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...
I prefer original pressings whenever possible. It's still sometimes cheaper, but that is quickly going the other way.
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?
Most people listen to music in their car. More compressed audio means less fiddling with the volume knob as you drive, regardless of normalization done by Spotify et al.
Anyhow that's my theory
Yep.
Most people aren't in a quiet environment when they listen to music these days. Compression helps significantly with this.
What would be neat would be to have a compression metadata 'guide' that would allow a compressor on-device to perform the compression, rather than baked into the audio track.
This would allow the user to tune 'severity' of compression. In a car / fancy headphones, you could sample the ambient noise level and adjust accordingly.
Or just have the default to be some level of acceptable compression turned on and then an advanced mode to turn it off (or tune it)
Most headphones people actually use are crap. Yes you can buy studio monitors from sony. That isn't what people are listening to. They are using airpods which sound like earpods have always sounded: crap, absent lows, terrible separation. So you compress the hell out of the audio and make it loud so you can actually hear something with those headphones.
What AirPods are you talking about? The wired AirPods that sound pretty bad have been overtaken by wireless Bluetooth AirPods for many years now. The AirPod Pro 2 sound quality is a world of difference from the wired earbud style AirPods. In fact, most of the most popular TWS Bluetooth Earbuds have fantastic sound quality. The main issue with them is that they have a V shaped tuning, with various levels of bad. However, Apple and Samsung tunings are quite decent.
All of them, compared to over ear monitors. You can't out engineer physics advantages of a larger speaker. Airpods fall short of other in ear monitors too fwiw, so they are a poor choice in class.
Physics doesn't prevent reproduction of bass in IEMs. Thanks to inverse square scaling of sound pressure with distance, putting the driver within the ear canal greatly reduces the required output level to the point where even tiny drivers can handle it. Lots of IEMs can reproduce loud, deep bass with low distortion.
You of course miss the whole-body tactile vibration effect of loud bass played on speakers, but the sound itself is there.
And you can buy replacement ear pads - breathing new life in to $150 Sony Studio Monitor phones I bought 30 years ago...
Those things you can tear open and re wire yourself if you really needed. Ship of Theseus mdr7506 is possible. Meanwhile how long do those airpod batteries last before you need to pay apples pizzo for replacement you can't do yourself? Some people say only like what 2 years or so. Rich coming from the company that no longer ships chargers due to ewaste concerns.
It's much less of a problem than it used to be because streaming platforms normalize the tracks anyway so it's been fading away for a while now.
As a mixing engineer:
1. Compressed sound can be an integral (wanted) part of different genre aesthetics. I personally love dynamic mixes, but if you let your customers A/B mixes they will often chose the more compressed/louder one. If your song sounds weak after another bands song, that is an issue.
2. For reasons of health/liability there are maximum levels on headphones and mobile playback devices. That means if my mix has a high dynamic range the bulk of it may really just be too low when played back on the majority of headphones. If I mix my own music this is a bargain I can make if I mix other peoples music I would try to be a little more on the cautious side if the musicians didn't demand a highly dynamic mix.
3. Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music. 90% of people who listen to music do not listen to it actively, they just let it run in the background or are passively exposed to it. Try listening to a good dynamic recording of Beethovens fith in your car with the window rolled down. You will hear some strong phrases then inbetween nothing as it is below the ambient noise floor.
Vinyl has the benefit, that I as the mixing engineer can assume that the listener will be much more likely actively involved with the music than say in a radio mix.
And just wait until they find out that compressor/limiters came about for reasons other than shaping the dynamics of music. If you're not slammed against the wall, your AM broadcast signal isn't going far.
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.
They are the same coked up idiots who did an end-run around Congress to the WIPO, to get their DMCA forced by treaty obligations back in the '90s.
The full dynamic range is nice if you actually want to experience it and have a system capable of reproducing it. A dedicated center channel with a few hundred watts of amplification behind it will cut through the ambient backdrop like a hot knife through butter. You can watch Transformers or MI3 at reference volume with crystal clear dialogue if you're willing to throw enough power at the problem.
I've always set up my center channel volume using the test mode (by ear many years ago, and more recently automatically with Yamaha's YPAO).
Am I meant to then override that by increasing the center channel volume so it's louder than the other speakers?
Or raise the system volume?
What really would solve the movie issue is there was more standardised sound across different streaming services. Every single seems to have a different volume and compression / setup.
That and having an industry standard way to crank the center channel (user setting) when downmixing to 2.1
The main reason vinyl often sounds better is because it is better mastered, so this is concerning.
That's just not true and vinyl doesn't sound better by any measure.
It's true from time to time. Low's last digital releases are actually unlistenable due to heavy-handed compression, but the vinyl seems to have been spared.
I had to record the vinyl to get usable digital files.
The loudness and compression on Low's last couple of albums is very much deliberate, so it's surprising that the vinyl doesn't have it. Though I heard similar claims about Sleater-Kinney's The Woods, which was also intensely compressed for artistic effect.
This. The loudness is an aesthetic choice.
The reason it was backed off for the vinyl master is most likely due to physical limitations of the medium. If the audio channels are too loud (wide) there is risk that the needle will jump out of the groove.
There's compression and distortion for sure on the vinyl, but when you look at the waveform on the digital it's right up to the max. It completely changes the sound.
It’s completely true, when the vinyl has a different mastering. It can be a completely different version. It’s not because it’s vinyl
Mastering doesn't change much. They're just going to roll off the low end a bit. A separate mix is an entirely different thing though.
I'd say "rarely" instead of "often" though it depends on the genre I guess. There are also a lot of genres that can never sound as good on vinyl simply due to the lack of dynamic range/silence; mostly classical and electronic.
Are there any known ways to undo the compression? Assuming no clipping, the process should be reversible, right?
No, you need the original mix to remaster it yourself.
If you just amplify the whole track until its max amplitude reaches the medium's maximum, yes you could undo that.
But the loudness war aims to make the whole track even louder than that, by quietening those max peaks so they don't clip, then that gives you room to amplify the rest of the track even further. The dynamic range of the recording is permanently reduced.
"Assuming no clipping" is the biggest problem there, because the loudness wars resulted in a ton of very lossy clipping and similar artifacts. Arguably that sort of distortion became part of the expected sound, though, so just because it isn't reversible doesn't necessarily mean it is a problem.
In the open metadata world there is ReplayGain which analyzes music peaks and tries to create a negative gain to equalize the dynamic range to a standard volume at both the individual track and full album level.
Apple Music, Spotify, and others have proprietary but similar systems.
(As someone who deeply loves to shuffle an entire library, having a music player that supports ReplayGain has long been a personal requirement.)
ReplayGain sounds pretty cool. Does it pre analyse your library ?
Short answer, no not really. It won’t ever be as good as a proper uncompressed mastering
you can use an expander or something more advanced like Ozone 12's Unlimiter. you still lose signal when you compress even if you're not clipping so it won't be perfect
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.
>it sounds more like what buyers today expect
Is that really true? Anybody buying music today instead of streaming is somebody who takes music more seriously than most. It seems likely they're going to care more about sound quality than the streaming audience.
The fix is to disqualify album of the year eligibility for anything showing evidence of severe clipping. The industry would rapidly shape itself up.
And who, exactly, would approve that misguided proposal?
I suspect you’re not involved in contemporary record making. Like it or not, clipping is a technique and a color that producers, mixers, and mastering engineers all choose to impart for aesthetic and technical reasons. It has it’s uses.
If your proposal were passed all that would be left for consideration would be a handful lame DSD jazz records from those hi-fi enthusiasts who are disconnected from the reality around how most records are made these days.
RIAA is a standards body.
I thought that due to physical limits of the media that mfgs would avoid this temptation -looks like I’m way off.
Everybody is lazy nowadays and sends their ruined digital mixes out for everything. It's the production teams that need to fix their behavior.
What RIAA should do is promote universal use of ReplayGain across digital distribution platforms. That way people can manage relative volume as desired without the need to corrupt the audio. They could make money with a signed tag certifying the mix meets quality standards.
The modern equivalent of ReplayGain, EBU R 128, is already ubiquitous in the industry. People brickwall records anyway, presumably because more people are likely to complain about being unable to hear the quiet parts in their car, or about their phone speaker not being able to play it loud enough, than about the whole thing sounding squashed.
The ideal solution would be to distribute high dynamic range audio with metadata to configure optional playback-time dynamic range compression for noisy listening environments or weak playback equipment.
Agreed
Or make a sound format (like video containers) that could have two separate mixes of a track.
Great website!
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?
Why get a canvas print when you could put up a TV and display the picture digitally?
I'm guessing you're not a musician or studio worker, or I wasn't clear.
If I am using an analog device (in my case tube amplifier) I want to listen to something that was mastered on analog equipment. If it's square wave pressed on to vinyl you might as well stream.
You should save the exaggerated euphemisms for your audiophile subreddits. "square waves pressed on to vinyl" just proves you have no clue of the physics to an HN audience.
Hooboy. Where do I even start with this?