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It's a common misconception that vinyl necessarily imparts all possible audio benefits to whatever is pressed into it. Now, I'm not Gaga's recording engineer,
by tammer 11y ago
It's a common misconception that vinyl necessarily imparts all possible audio benefits to whatever is pressed into it.
Now, I'm not Gaga's recording engineer, and for all I know you're absolutely right and her & her team remastered each track without compression for the vinyl pressing. Considering how rare such a process is in industry recording, however, I doubt it. I assume that really the difference you're hearing is typical of all vinyl recordings: a type of distortion that comes from both pressing and playback through an RIAA preamplifier.
People use all sorts of terms to describe the difference between vinyl & digital sound, but mostly descriptors center around words like "warmer," or "more open" or "brighter." These are really just beneficial side-effects of the standards developed to overcome vinyl's limitations as a recording medium.
So, in reality quality and compression come in to play long before the pressing actually occurs, on the mastered track itself. I've come to realize that a poorly handled transfer to vinyl will often sound not nearly as clear or detailed as a high-res or even "Mastered for iTunes" track.
- shmageggy 11y agoMastering for vinyl is very common in the industry. I don't have time to dig up a reference right now, but the medium has different constraints than digital so is usually mastered separately, especially for big budget stuff. The differing constraints are mainly that while CD has a hard amplitude limit (hence brickwall limiting), the constraint on vinyl is not hard in the same way -- it mostly has to do with amplitude of low frequencies and skipping grooves.
- earlz 11y agoMy understanding is that with vinyl, if the signal has too high of an RMS at low frequencies the needle can literally skip off the groove, and for this reason vinyl can't necessarily be as compressed and loud..
- nosuchthing 11y ago• The audio is subjected to low-pass or all-pass filtering, which can result in broad peaks becoming slanted ramps. • The amount and stereo separation of deep bass content is reduced for vinyl, to keep the stylus from being thrown out of the groove. http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_%28Vinyl%29#Effect_of_vinyl_mastering_on_dynamic_range http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_%28Vinyl%29... http://www.laweekly.com/music/why-cds-may-actually-sound-better-than-vinyl-5352162 http://www.laweekly.com/music/why-cds-may-actually-sound-bet...
- beat 11y agoNot necessarily, but full-power vinyl grooves would cause all sorts of distortion and misbehavior for the very mechanical nature of cartridges and tonearms. Likewise, high frequencies would be so small they couldn't really be picked up. Hence the RIAA curve, which is an eq curve applied to the mastering before put to vinyl that reduces the lows and exaggerates the highs. It is reversed by the phono preamp during playback.
- lfam 11y agoThis is true. Mastering for vinyl is basically a completely different set of skills than mastering for other media.
- ZoFreX 11y agoI agree that mastering for vinyl happens, but you're not right about the dynamic range. CDs were popular initially because they have a wider dynamic range, the overly compressed / "loudness wars" tracks are nowhere near the limits of the medium. It is true that vinyl these days often has wider dynamic range - because the market for how songs sound is different for people buying vinyl, so they're mastered with wider range.
- shmageggy 11y agoThe comment was not about dynamic range, but the nature of the upper amplitude limit (hard vs soft/frequency dependent). That says nothing about the dynamic range, which is still a creative decision during mastering. I was trying to point out that vinyl mastering is common (contrary to parent post) and that one reason is the technical differences between mediums. I agree, though, that market pressures are a strong driver of the differing creative choices during mastering, but the decision to master separately for vinyl is often indepenent of that.