I 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?
entropicdrifter 4 minutes ago [-]
Most 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
esikich 15 minutes ago [-]
It'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.
larodi 43 minutes ago [-]
Depending 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.
I prefer original pressings whenever possible. It's still sometimes cheaper, but that is quickly going the other way.
kevin_thibedeau 48 minutes ago [-]
The fix is to disqualify album of the year eligibility for anything showing evidence of severe clipping. The industry would rapidly shape itself up.
mc32 37 minutes ago [-]
I thought that due to physical limits of the media that mfgs would avoid this temptation -looks like I’m way off.
kevin_thibedeau 19 minutes ago [-]
Everybody 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.
qwery 28 minutes ago [-]
I 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.
everdrive 43 minutes ago [-]
It'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.
mdhen 4 days ago [-]
The main reason vinyl often sounds better is because it is better mastered, so this is concerning.
esikich 13 minutes ago [-]
That's just not true and vinyl doesn't sound better by any measure.
CarVac 9 minutes ago [-]
It'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.
itchingsphynx 5 days ago [-]
Great website!
Rendered at 18:17:48 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Anyhow that's my theory
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.
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.
I had to record the vinyl to get usable digital files.