4 ms·

Vinyl 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

Vinyl 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 ago
Which 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 ago
  CDs were most commonly played in cars on the loud highway
  - breezybottom 4mo ago
    That'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 ago
    Huh? 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 ago
      Now, 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.
      - ssl-3 4mo ago
        Cassettes were great, though. They could pile up, unprotected, in the center console or find their way under the seat and be fine. That pile might have everything from your mom's Vivaldi tape to the MC5 bootleg you got from your older brother. Sick of listening to whatever's in the deck right now? Just rummage through them without looking using the gear-shift hand and hold one up in an instant without taking eyes very far off the road. Upon finding one that's Good Enough For Right Now: Pop the old one out of the tape player with a ker-chunk and a blast of radio noise, and then quickly plunge its replacement into the empty hole -- all with muscle memory. Frozen mist on the windshield on a cold morning? There's a cassette-shaped ice scraper right there in the dash. Take it out, use it to scrape the ice off the window, and put it back in. It still works. CD-Rs helped a ton and I deliberately avoided CDs in cars until I was able to make CDs cheaply at home. But they were still delicate things in ways that tapes never were, they still skipped in ways that tapes never did, and their sonic improvements weren't very meaningful over the wind and road noise with the factory stereo of a malaise-era Chevrolet.
        functionmouse 4mo ago
        > and be fine. lolno those things were a finicky failure prone analog nightmare.
        ssl-3 4mo ago
        Compared to what? CDs that would skip on movement or scratch and skip worse? CD-R that would delaminate? Vinyl records? The continuous-loop abomination of 8-track? Compact cassette tapes were profoundly robust compared to everything else.
        antonvs 4mo ago
        > CD-R that would delaminate? What kind of cheap-ass CD-R discs were you buying?
    - functionmouse 4mo ago
      alternatively, there was such a market desire for CDs in the car that the ten disc changer in the trunk was a thing.
      - mixmastamyk 4mo ago
        They were never good in the car, merely tolerable without option. Early on they skipped, and they were always bigger than cassettes, more expensive, and significantly more fragile. The changer made them very expensive to boot. Why most CD listening was done in the home, and cassettes held on for longer than expected.
    - vel0city 4mo ago
      Right? Why didn't we think to just use Android Auto or Carplay in the 90s/2000s. We were all such idiots back then.
      - deleted 4mo ago
        [deleted]
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - aidenn0 4mo ago
    And the first CD player I saw in a car had a button to apply dynamic range compression.
  - mancerayder 4mo ago
    Says who? I remember having one of those cassette adapters that was a tape that you'd stick in the tape drive, and you'd attach to the headphone jack of a portable CD player. Maybe I was poor, but cars had cassettes most of my youth, while people had CD players at home.
    - bbatha 4mo ago
      Exactly cd players in cars didn’t become common until the 2000s when anti skip became common place.
  - kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 4mo ago
    You know, there are more countries than the US.
    - antonvs 4mo ago
      You should try spending some time in the US, to discover just how irrelevant that is to most USians. It's an eye-opening level of parochialism.
  - CarlitosHighway 4mo ago
    Seems very US tunnel vision. Source for this unspecific claim?
- topranks 4mo ago
  There is, see my other reply. CDs are able to store much louder tracks than can be cut on a record. The technical reason things on CD got louder is because they could.
pier25 4mo ago
> Vinyl literally has less than half the dynamic range of CD A lot less than half. It's around 20-30db and every 10db is a factor of 10. The CD has between 100-1000x more dynamic range.
- pineaux 4mo ago
  That is a false way of saying it. Because then you are unpacking what dBs are, which is fascinating, but not how humans perceive sound. We use dBs exactly because it approaches human experience of sound better (although still shitty) than sound pressure would. A better logarithmic system would use base 2, I think phons tried to popularize that, but signal processing calculation with a base 2 log is less convenient than a base 10 log. So I think that is the reason. For who wants to know: sound perception doubles every 10dB so. 30db of dynamic range is about 8 times as much dynamic range from the perceptual perspective.
  - pier25 4mo ago
    > That is a false way of saying it As an audio engineer I'm well aware of how decibels work and why we use them. You're talking about subjective perception but I'm talking about objective measurements.
    - killerstorm 4mo ago
      Objectively we care about the amount of information in the signal, not air movement. Air movement is just a medium which conveys information. It's not just "subjective perception", it's the meaning of the process.
      - pier25 4mo ago
        I'm stating an objective measurable fact not arguing about semantics or meaning, whatever that is for you.
        jmalicki 4mo ago
basisword 4mo ago
The dynamic range of the format isn't the issue though, it's the mastering. CD mastering largely pushed volume at the expense of dynamic range (part of the reason we see endless remasters these days). Vinyl doesn't automatically mean a better master but older stuff is much less compressed.
hulitu 4mo ago
> Vinyl literally has less than half the dynamic range of CD In theory, yes. In practice it depends on the "loudness".
topranks 4mo ago
CD has better dynamic range, sure. But a CD is also able to represent a signal with _much less dynamic range_ than it’s possible to cut on a record. It was the move to digital that facilitated the loudness war. In modern years it’s been fairly common for masters to vinyl to be less compressed than the CD release, for the simple reason vinyl has more limitations.

breezybottom 4mo ago

Which 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 ago
CDs were most commonly played in cars on the loud highway
- breezybottom 4mo ago
  That'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 ago
  Huh? 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 ago
    Now, 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.
    - ssl-3 4mo ago
      Cassettes were great, though. They could pile up, unprotected, in the center console or find their way under the seat and be fine. That pile might have everything from your mom's Vivaldi tape to the MC5 bootleg you got from your older brother. Sick of listening to whatever's in the deck right now? Just rummage through them without looking using the gear-shift hand and hold one up in an instant without taking eyes very far off the road. Upon finding one that's Good Enough For Right Now: Pop the old one out of the tape player with a ker-chunk and a blast of radio noise, and then quickly plunge its replacement into the empty hole -- all with muscle memory. Frozen mist on the windshield on a cold morning? There's a cassette-shaped ice scraper right there in the dash. Take it out, use it to scrape the ice off the window, and put it back in. It still works. CD-Rs helped a ton and I deliberately avoided CDs in cars until I was able to make CDs cheaply at home. But they were still delicate things in ways that tapes never were, they still skipped in ways that tapes never did, and their sonic improvements weren't very meaningful over the wind and road noise with the factory stereo of a malaise-era Chevrolet.
      - functionmouse 4mo ago
        > and be fine. lolno those things were a finicky failure prone analog nightmare.
        ssl-3 4mo ago
        Compared to what? CDs that would skip on movement or scratch and skip worse? CD-R that would delaminate? Vinyl records? The continuous-loop abomination of 8-track? Compact cassette tapes were profoundly robust compared to everything else.
        antonvs 4mo ago
        > CD-R that would delaminate? What kind of cheap-ass CD-R discs were you buying?
  - functionmouse 4mo ago
    alternatively, there was such a market desire for CDs in the car that the ten disc changer in the trunk was a thing.
    - mixmastamyk 4mo ago
      They were never good in the car, merely tolerable without option. Early on they skipped, and they were always bigger than cassettes, more expensive, and significantly more fragile. The changer made them very expensive to boot. Why most CD listening was done in the home, and cassettes held on for longer than expected.
  - vel0city 4mo ago
    Right? Why didn't we think to just use Android Auto or Carplay in the 90s/2000s. We were all such idiots back then.
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- aidenn0 4mo ago
  And the first CD player I saw in a car had a button to apply dynamic range compression.
- mancerayder 4mo ago
  Says who? I remember having one of those cassette adapters that was a tape that you'd stick in the tape drive, and you'd attach to the headphone jack of a portable CD player. Maybe I was poor, but cars had cassettes most of my youth, while people had CD players at home.
  - bbatha 4mo ago
    Exactly cd players in cars didn’t become common until the 2000s when anti skip became common place.
- kkkqkqkqkqlqlql 4mo ago
  You know, there are more countries than the US.
  - antonvs 4mo ago
    You should try spending some time in the US, to discover just how irrelevant that is to most USians. It's an eye-opening level of parochialism.
- CarlitosHighway 4mo ago
  Seems very US tunnel vision. Source for this unspecific claim?
topranks 4mo ago
There is, see my other reply. CDs are able to store much louder tracks than can be cut on a record. The technical reason things on CD got louder is because they could.

pier25 4mo ago

> Vinyl literally has less than half the dynamic range of CD A lot less than half. It's around 20-30db and every 10db is a factor of 10. The CD has between 100-1000x more dynamic range.

pineaux 4mo ago
That is a false way of saying it. Because then you are unpacking what dBs are, which is fascinating, but not how humans perceive sound. We use dBs exactly because it approaches human experience of sound better (although still shitty) than sound pressure would. A better logarithmic system would use base 2, I think phons tried to popularize that, but signal processing calculation with a base 2 log is less convenient than a base 10 log. So I think that is the reason. For who wants to know: sound perception doubles every 10dB so. 30db of dynamic range is about 8 times as much dynamic range from the perceptual perspective.
- pier25 4mo ago
  > That is a false way of saying it As an audio engineer I'm well aware of how decibels work and why we use them. You're talking about subjective perception but I'm talking about objective measurements.
  - killerstorm 4mo ago
    Objectively we care about the amount of information in the signal, not air movement. Air movement is just a medium which conveys information. It's not just "subjective perception", it's the meaning of the process.
    - pier25 4mo ago
      I'm stating an objective measurable fact not arguing about semantics or meaning, whatever that is for you.
      - jmalicki 4mo ago

basisword 4mo ago

The dynamic range of the format isn't the issue though, it's the mastering. CD mastering largely pushed volume at the expense of dynamic range (part of the reason we see endless remasters these days). Vinyl doesn't automatically mean a better master but older stuff is much less compressed.

hulitu 4mo ago

> Vinyl literally has less than half the dynamic range of CD In theory, yes. In practice it depends on the "loudness".

topranks 4mo ago

CD has better dynamic range, sure. But a CD is also able to represent a signal with _much less dynamic range_ than it’s possible to cut on a record. It was the move to digital that facilitated the loudness war. In modern years it’s been fairly common for masters to vinyl to be less compressed than the CD release, for the simple reason vinyl has more limitations.