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Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)
- apercu 4mo agoI'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?
- gosub100 4mo agoWhy get a canvas print when you could put up a TV and display the picture digitally?
- apercu 4mo agoI'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.
- cfraenkel 4mo agoYou 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.
- apercu 4mo agoYep, never studied physics. Do know the difference between a sine wave and a square wave, though. We can debate whether people can hear the difference, and mastering has as much (or more) to do with it, but I will take an AAA or AAD over an ADD all day.
- aidenn0 4mo agoThere are some phenomenal sounding DDD masters from the late 80s. I believe it requires all 3 of these, which were present then: 1. Digital recording equipment had significantly improved 2. Audio engineers learned how to use the equipment 3. Heavy digital compressors weren't in use yet.
- bigbuppo 4mo agoHooboy. Where do I even start with this?
- ghusto 4mo agoBecause the TV wouldn't be as good a representation of the original painting as the canvas print would be. Similarly, vinyl wouldn't be as good a representation of the original sound as CDs would be.
- sgreene570 4mo ago[dead]
- sneela 4mo agoAlso 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-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...
- soupfordummies 4mo agoI prefer original pressings whenever possible. It's still sometimes cheaper, but that is quickly going the other way.
- buildsjets 4mo agoI keep 3 pressings of Led Zep II out so I can demonstrate the difference to people who don’t believe that there is one. A first-week Robert Ludwig mastered version, a second-week pressing of the Ahmet Ertegun disaster, and 1977 remaster that really sounds just as good as the 1969 RL mix and is a lot cheaper. $20 for a VG+ copy compared to $1300. I am not insane so I did not spend $1300 on a used vinyl record, I found mine for $2 at Goodwill. https://www.therevolverclub.com/blogs/the-revolver-club/the-hot-mix-of-the-led-zeppelin-ii1969-by-robert-ludwig?srsltid=AfmBOop86zJ6gnWNKLnbAr-q8_uHGPKkTUwAQGz4jS6XxHeVEC-cd0u1 https://www.therevolverclub.com/blogs/the-revolver-club/the-...
- itchingsphynx 4mo agoGreat website!
- mdhen 4mo agoThe main reason vinyl often sounds better is because it is better mastered, so this is concerning.
- esikich 4mo agoThat's just not true and vinyl doesn't sound better by any measure.
- CarVac 4mo agoIt'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.
- wk_end 4mo agoThe 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.
- CarVac 4mo agoThere'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.
- jlarcombe 4mo agoThe thing is, vinyl (and tape) typically can't reproduce waveforms like that accurately, so it's difficult to compare. You can take a hyper-compressed master, cut it to vinyl or record it to tape, then play it back in to a computer, and it'll look different and less "brickwalled".
- 4mo ago
- kevin_thibedeau 4mo agoThe fix is to disqualify album of the year eligibility for anything showing evidence of severe clipping. The industry would rapidly shape itself up.
- mc32 4mo agoI thought that due to physical limits of the media that mfgs would avoid this temptation -looks like I’m way off.
- kevin_thibedeau 4mo agoEverybody 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.
- mrob 4mo agoThe 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.
- Melatonic 4mo agoAgreed Or make a sound format (like video containers) that could have two separate mixes of a track.
- Slow_Hand 4mo agoAnd 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.
- larodi 4mo agoDepending 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.
- emsign 4mo agoThat's not true anymore. I've heard about complains about badly compressed vinyl releases by indie artists. Just a few days ago I came across a comment on discogs.com about this issue: https://www.discogs.com/release/37244526-April-VISTA-Traditional-Noise https://www.discogs.com/release/37244526-April-VISTA-Traditi... The issue is that vinyl mastering is a special case and different from digital mastering. You have to consider extra things like the width of the grooves, they can vary depending on the runtime of a side, this affects low frequencies as grooves might cut into each other and you'll get skips. And high frequencies degrade the closer you get towards the center of the record. I just think the people who can do this craft are simply retiring or dying out. This affects major label and indie artists alike.
- sevenzero 4mo agoThis is mostly the result of a lot of vinyl factories having shut down due to vinyl becoming mostly irrelevant after the release of more convenient formats like the CD. At least irrelevant enough to make factories unsustainable. Most modern vinyls have extremely bad quality, I'd even go as far and say almost all freshly produced vinyls. Source: I've worked in a high end luxury HiFi store for years prior to getting into tech, selling turn tables, tube amps, speakers and basically whatever you can think off in that space.
- maqp 4mo agoPSA: https://dr.loudness-war.info/ https://dr.loudness-war.info/ is a great place to look for info on dynamic range of releases, and also, a great place to find new music with excellent dynamic range.
- everdrive 4mo agoIt'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.
- bob1029 4mo agoThe 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.
- Melatonic 4mo agoWhat 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
- rahimnathwani 4mo agoI'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?
- aidenn0 4mo agoI have a decent[1] system with a dedicated center channel. Everybody complains that the mix is too loud if we tune for audible dialog on anything made in the past decade or so (MI3 bluray is fine, and I suspect that Transformers would be too). 1: Powered by a Denon AVR, not separates if you want to "No true cinephile" me.
- qwery 4mo agoI 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.
- mrob 4mo ago>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.
- qwery 4mo agoIs it true? No idea. It's plausible. My point was that one example of a heavily compressed track doesn't make a loudness war. I offered a plausible alternative explanation of the same facts. It seems likely that someone buying a mass market album today would expect it to sound pretty similar across all formats. I don't know why you've introduced this 'serious' vs. streaming thing. What does taking music more seriously even mean here? If you seriously like listening to normalised Purple Rain on 128 kbps mp3 and also like collecting physical media, you might seriously like to buy and listen to normalised Purple Rain on your preferred (lossless, or less-lossy) format.
- pimeys 4mo agoI 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?
- esikich 4mo agoIt'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.
- breezybottom 4mo agoI don't know where you're getting this. For rock/pop music, it's as bad as it's ever been.
- pier25 4mo agoYep many current pop songs are commonly mastered at around -8 LUFS even peaking at -5 LUFS which is quite loud.
- globular-toast 4mo agoAll things being equal, the compressed tracks will still sound louder even after normalisation, unfortunately. I haven't seen any sign of dynamics returning to pop music since Spotify/YouTube.
- entropicdrifter 4mo agoMost 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
- hex4def6 4mo agoYep. 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.
- buo 4mo agoAre there any known ways to undo the compression? Assuming no clipping, the process should be reversible, right?
- macmccann 4mo agoyou 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
- nighthawk454 4mo agoShort answer, no not really. It won’t ever be as good as a proper uncompressed mastering
- amiga386 4mo agoNo, 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.
- hurtigioll 4mo agopeople said "it's impossible to separate tracks (voice, bass, ...) after they are mixed". true in theory, but neural-networks can separate them in practice same here, but there is no real market for somebody to bother yet
- svelle 4mo ago> but neural-networks can separate them in practice That's a massive stretch. They are able separate them sort of, but they are nowhere close the original quality of the individual tracks.
- 3mo ago
- emsign 4mo agoThis 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.
- jocelyner 4mo ago[dead]
- emptyfile 4mo agoSorry, 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.
- badgersnake 4mo agoThis was literally the only reason vinyl made any sense.
- Cthulhu_ 4mo agoUsing "literally" doesn't make your comment factual; it's one reason, but also I just think they're neat. That is, they're more collectible than CDs in my opinion. Bigger packaging for better artwork, something physical and relatively sturdy, etc.
- badgersnake 4mo agoVinyl? Sturdy? Please.
- a96 3mo agoMaybe compared to the CD "jewel" cases.
- badgersnake 3mo agoBetter than shellac I guess. Jewel cases are fragile, but they’re largely standard and can be easily replaced if the crack or the dots in the middle snap off. It has no bearing on the artwork or the music itself.
- dintech 4mo agoIn 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.
- steveBK123 4mo agoDo you think the removal of technical limitations re: the number of tracks & voices has introduced "loudness" as well in terms of more distinct sounds competing for the same sonic space? It's crazy watching some of the producer YT videos now and they open up these projects with 105 tracks, multi-layered/multi-voice drums, etc.
- redwall_hp 4mo agoThey did that back in the reel to reel tape days too...it was just destructive. Songs could have tons of layers, but they had to bounce tracks down to stay within track limits for the final mix. Queen's music is a massive pile of overdubs, especially for vocals and guitar. The Beatles also, and they were heavily into looping (physically cutting audio tape and gluing it in a loop, then re-recording it). Vocal and guitar double-tracking has also been the norm since the 50s, at least. 80s pop was also generally full of synthesizer stacks, where MIDI from one keyboard was simultaneously triggering several synths to create layers.
- TheOtherHobbes 4mo agoVinyl 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.
- breezybottom 4mo agoWhich is why it's so bizarre that CDs are generally less dynamic than vinyl. There's no technical reason that should be the case.
- functionmouse 4mo agoCDs were most commonly played in cars on the loud highway
- breezybottom 4mo agoThat's a good point. CD mastering was very dynamic until around the mid-90s, and that probably correlates with CD players becoming a standard option in cars.
- mixmastamyk 4mo agoHuh? CDs are a poor fit in cars to the point that the ten disc changer in the trunk was a thing. To avoid the inevitable damage from swapping them.
- mjr00 4mo agoNow, yes, but in the 90s/00s the alternative to CDs was cassette tapes, which were both inferior audio quality and took up more space. CD players in cars were a very desirable feature back then. At my peak in the mid-00s I remember counting and finding I had just over 500 CDs in my car, almost all of which were MP3s burnt to playable CD-Rs laying in the passenger seat... the good old days. Nice thing about using CD-Rs is you didn't have to care about them getting scratched, either.
- pwarner 4mo agoI'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.
- rglullis 4mo agoIf the mix is the bigger issue, why does the media format matter?
- jonhohle 4mo agoI read that as: SACD customers expect a better mix. The format is only relevant in that it requires audiophile level dedication and money to use the format in the first place. Not dissimilar to vinyl before its recent boom. I have an SACD setup, but for what I want to listen to, everything is out of print and secondary market is insane. Players can be found relatively cheaply at thrift stores (many don’t bluray and multi-CD carousels support it with digital output).
- aidenn0 4mo agoI vaguely recall reading about a double-blind test with the DSD stream from an SACD converted to 44.1kHz 16-bit PCM. Even without proper dithering, listeners could not tell the difference between that and the SACD[1], but could tell the difference between that and the CD version of the same album.
- IshKebab 4mo ago> Here are samples from the original and remastered vinyl versions to compare the difference in sound rendering. Where? The critical bit is missing!
- danadam 4mo agoWayback Machine still has them: https://web.archive.org/web/20260208100527/https://magicvinyldigital.net/2025/04/27/vinyl-succumbs-to-loudness-war-more-than-just-collateral-damage/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260208100527/https://magicviny...
- ryanmcbride 4mo agoI'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.
- threetonesun 4mo agoI like this idea, it's a bit like retro gaming with the original games/consoles/controllers instead of emulating things.
- ryanmcbride 4mo agounsurprisingly I also have that as a hobby
- H1Supreme 4mo agoI 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.
- mjr00 4mo agoThe loudness war in the strict "we must compress and slam everything as much as possible to make our stuff sound good on the radio" sense is over thanks to Spotify et al doing loudness normalization, but there's still an open question of "how much compression does sound good?" which is extremely subjective. A lot of modern music is louder than peak loudness war stuff just because the creators want their music to be slammed to shit. I listen to/make aggressive bass music and -5, -4, -3 LUFS are common. (By comparison, some of the common examples of loudness war era CDs like Definitely Maybe and Californication sit between -8 and -6 LUFS.) > Especially since the answer to any loudness problem is to simply for the user to turn up the volume. This isn't quite true as compression addresses differences in volume. Unless you expect the listener to actively turn up the volume during the quiet parts and down during the loud parts of your song, or be listening in a completely quiet environment with nothing but the music so they can appreciate the dynamics--which is the way a lot of vinyl aficionados do listen to music.