4 ms·

I confess: I used to get Vinyl rips of old albums for this reason on what.cd It wasn't that Vinyl is better, but the MIXES were better. They didn't compress th

• kazinator 9y ago
  If a modern, loudness-compressed digital mix is rendered into vinyl, it will have the same property. I think that before digital, recording engineers treated the headroom as that: headroom: it was there to "have" not to abuse all the time. With analog, you don't exactly know where the red line is, either. Plus there is the effect of a gradual onset of distortion which is interpreted by the ear as loudness. With digital, you can level the loudness with an algorithm to use the full headroom. It can be done with analog tools, too, but digital ones are just more "surgically precise"; the algorithm can look at the track globally, not just with an infinite impulse response circuit that whose output is only based on its prior input, and which cannot anticipate transients.