4 ms·

Record Store Day is maddening. You have the huge name bands like Foo Fighters clogging up the vinyl plants for months to produce their stuff in huge quantities,

Record Store Day is maddening. You have the huge name bands like Foo Fighters clogging up the vinyl plants for months to produce their stuff in huge quantities, and then you find out that they just used the brickwalled DR6 CD master for the source material, killing all of the benefits of vinyl, and leaving you with all of the downsides. The plants are obviously happy to have extra business, but they're not making enough money to buy more presses, so as these big name releases that actually sound worse than their digital counterparts are taking up more and more of a finite resource and preventing quality content from being pressed. I have an extensive vinyl collection, but I'll be the first to tell you that the actual physical format is vastly inferior to CD. The only benefit is that a decent amount of vinyl releases do not have the same mastering as the CD, due to the perception that many of the vinyl purchasers are audiophiles and want the higher dynamic range master or are only buying the vinyl to display it somewhere and never listen to it, and don't care about the DR on the release. But plenty of releases are also lazily done and are just the shitty CD masters with the RIAA curve applied and pressed onto an LP. The Loudness War ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war ) needs to go away so I can go back to happily buying digital formats and stop dealing with all of this bullshit.

brandonmenc 11y ago
> The Loudness War needs to go away according to your link, it is going away: "Analysis suggests that the loudness trend may have peaked around 2005 and subsequently reduced, with a pronounced increase in overall and minimum album DR (crest factor) for albums since 2005." This tracks with what I hear on new recordings.
- cthalupa 11y ago
  It's gotten better, but it's still plenty prevalent, especially in rock and all of it's various subgenres. One of my favorite albums from 2014 has perhaps some of the absolute worst mastering I've ever listened to. http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/69622 http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/69622 The dynamic range is so low you actually hear clipping on the CD version. The same album, on vinyl? http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/91768 http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/91768 Now, because of the way DR is scored, a vinyl album will almost always score higher on a DR test, but you can generally see this right away without even listening, because everything will have a pretty uniform 3-4 DR boost. But this one is a dedicated vinyl master, and the score increase comes from that. (For more in depth on this specific release, the guys at AngryMetalGuy wrote up a lengthy review/screed about the loudness war/etc http://www.angrymetalguy.com/fallujah-the-flesh-prevails-prevails-review-of-the-dr10-master/ http://www.angrymetalguy.com/fallujah-the-flesh-prevails-pre... ) Mainstream rock is still really bad about it, and less-mainstream metal is some of the worst.
  - vanderZwan 11y ago
    > Now, because of the way it's recorded, a vinyl album will almost always score higher on a DR test Hold up, what? As far as technological potential is concerned, CDs have a far higher dynamic range than vinyl! Just listen to classical music if you don't believe me. The only problem is the way they are mastered.
    - cthalupa 11y ago
      What I wrote was vague - I've since corrected it. The way DR is scored by automatic tools will give a needle drop a higher DR than a CD version even if they have the same original master with the same DR. I'm saying that just because an vinyl rip of the same song has a higher scored DR doesn't automatically mean it actually has a different master with more dynamic range. Edit: Metal-Fi guys have a good article on it http://www.metal-fi.com/vinyl-doesnt-measure-up/ http://www.metal-fi.com/vinyl-doesnt-measure-up/
      - vanderZwan 11y ago
        Ah, ok. Thanks for clearing that up.
  - cjslep 11y ago
    > Mainstream rock is still really bad about it, and less-mainstream metal is some of the worst. I agree. In my experience as a heavy metal show radio host from 2009-2013, it seemed like a very significant proportion of heavy metal is mastered to have almost no DR whatsoever. When we would load up songs to sample for IDs and promotions, every song would be a gigantic solid rectangle of sound.
jpmattia 11y ago
> The only benefit is that a decent amount of vinyl releases do not have the same mastering as the CD, due to the perception that many of the vinyl purchasers are audiophiles and want the higher dynamic range master Wait: There are two masters? How many bits is the higher DR master?
geebee 11y ago
Wow. This is really interesting, it's something that I've wondered about. So, the situation is that some vinyl recordings are just vinyl versions of digital recordings? Does this happen in the other direction? I've wondered if some of the turntables and speakers are just digitizing the output from the vinyl prior to playing the music. So in this case, you'd be vinyl-izing a digital source, and then digitizing the vinyl source. Does this happen at all? If you have any particularly good link/sources to read up about this, please let me know, I've had a passing interest in it for a while.

brandonmenc 11y ago

> The Loudness War needs to go away according to your link, it is going away: "Analysis suggests that the loudness trend may have peaked around 2005 and subsequently reduced, with a pronounced increase in overall and minimum album DR (crest factor) for albums since 2005." This tracks with what I hear on new recordings.

cthalupa 11y ago
It's gotten better, but it's still plenty prevalent, especially in rock and all of it's various subgenres. One of my favorite albums from 2014 has perhaps some of the absolute worst mastering I've ever listened to. http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/69622 http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/69622 The dynamic range is so low you actually hear clipping on the CD version. The same album, on vinyl? http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/91768 http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/91768 Now, because of the way DR is scored, a vinyl album will almost always score higher on a DR test, but you can generally see this right away without even listening, because everything will have a pretty uniform 3-4 DR boost. But this one is a dedicated vinyl master, and the score increase comes from that. (For more in depth on this specific release, the guys at AngryMetalGuy wrote up a lengthy review/screed about the loudness war/etc http://www.angrymetalguy.com/fallujah-the-flesh-prevails-prevails-review-of-the-dr10-master/ http://www.angrymetalguy.com/fallujah-the-flesh-prevails-pre... ) Mainstream rock is still really bad about it, and less-mainstream metal is some of the worst.
- vanderZwan 11y ago
  > Now, because of the way it's recorded, a vinyl album will almost always score higher on a DR test Hold up, what? As far as technological potential is concerned, CDs have a far higher dynamic range than vinyl! Just listen to classical music if you don't believe me. The only problem is the way they are mastered.
  - cthalupa 11y ago
    What I wrote was vague - I've since corrected it. The way DR is scored by automatic tools will give a needle drop a higher DR than a CD version even if they have the same original master with the same DR. I'm saying that just because an vinyl rip of the same song has a higher scored DR doesn't automatically mean it actually has a different master with more dynamic range. Edit: Metal-Fi guys have a good article on it http://www.metal-fi.com/vinyl-doesnt-measure-up/ http://www.metal-fi.com/vinyl-doesnt-measure-up/
    - vanderZwan 11y ago
      Ah, ok. Thanks for clearing that up.
- cjslep 11y ago
  > Mainstream rock is still really bad about it, and less-mainstream metal is some of the worst. I agree. In my experience as a heavy metal show radio host from 2009-2013, it seemed like a very significant proportion of heavy metal is mastered to have almost no DR whatsoever. When we would load up songs to sample for IDs and promotions, every song would be a gigantic solid rectangle of sound.

jpmattia 11y ago

> The only benefit is that a decent amount of vinyl releases do not have the same mastering as the CD, due to the perception that many of the vinyl purchasers are audiophiles and want the higher dynamic range master Wait: There are two masters? How many bits is the higher DR master?

geebee 11y ago

Wow. This is really interesting, it's something that I've wondered about. So, the situation is that some vinyl recordings are just vinyl versions of digital recordings? Does this happen in the other direction? I've wondered if some of the turntables and speakers are just digitizing the output from the vinyl prior to playing the music. So in this case, you'd be vinyl-izing a digital source, and then digitizing the vinyl source. Does this happen at all? If you have any particularly good link/sources to read up about this, please let me know, I've had a passing interest in it for a while.