A Surprising Advantage of Vinyl (2011)

https://blog.andymatuschak.org/post/6778945711/a-surprising-advantage-of-vinyl

by surprisetalk • 2 years ago

135 132 2 years ago

blog.andymatuschak.org

mborch• 2 years ago

Here's another reference on this: https://www.yoursoundmatters.com/vinyl-vs-cd-in-the-loudness....

As explained earlier, due to the physical limitations of vinyl, there are limits as to how loud you can press a record, and because vinyl is “for audiophiles” – there is less incentive for record companies to compromise the quality of vinyl releases. As a result, many vinyl records are mastered differently to the CD release with more dynamic range and at lower volumes.

But I read some place that Radiohead themselves preferred the more compressed sound, perhaps owing to listening in a car rather than a high fidelity setup.

tekla• 2 years ago

I've seen this trotted around and I think its absolute bullshit. I've asked multiple people in the music business, and they've all told me they use the same masters for CDs and Vinyl.

slily• 2 years ago

Yeah, it's mostly wishful thinking. The primary audience for records is not audiophiles, it's collectors who often don't even own a record player putting them up on display. Unless an artist/mastering engineer has a particular fondness for the medium they're not going to put much effort into the "analog" master.

JALTU2• 2 years ago

I would guess to agree: the "audiophile" is a microscopically small segment of the music market, and music companies, let alone manufacturers, are NOT going to spend extra time money on producing stuff for specialty segments (hence the MoFi fiasco). Marketing is enough! Most so-called audiophiles also are not really into DR or "dynamic sound" or anything but just their audio preferences, whether that's cool/expensive hardware or hanging out on head-fi.

d-lisp• 2 years ago

I have two versions of the same album, one on CD, one on vinyl. They don't sound the same and I prefer the version on vinyl, I am not implying it objectively sounds better, maybe it sounds worse at the wave level, but it sounds better to me, it seems much more "present". Could you teach me what is the reason for this ?

butterknife2• 2 years ago

Mastering engineer here. I supply less compressed versions for vinyl and would not sign under it if it was the same as CD/streaming. What labels do after the fact is another story...

viburnum• 2 years ago

Now they do but they didn’t used to.

badgersnake2• 2 years ago

Stadium Arcadium for example is definitely different on vinyl. The CD version and the ‘audiophile’ 24bit version are both horribly compressed.

mtillman2• 2 years ago

Related, many SACDs contain a two channel SA layer that is completely different than the red book layer. The medium is normally mastered to appeal to the widest audience. In the 80’s, CD players were very expensive so the mastering were made for that type of consumer. As CD players in cars became the more popular listening mechanism, the DR shrunk and loudness increased. Some (most I think) modern vinyl is actually just the digital mastering and the newer stuff is written from a DSD source-not tape. Even Mobile Fidelity got in trouble for claiming tape when in fact it was from a digital source. I’m old so my ears can’t tell the difference at normal listening volumes to DR as the article agrees but I can absolutely tell original redbook vs modern mastering. Black Sabbath Sabotage is a good example of mastering techniques to “correct” for mic dropouts and what not.

For loudness comps check out: https://dr.loudness-war.info/

m4633• 2 years ago

I have some SACDs but can't actually play them, even though my dac can do the audio. Is there some way to put the tracks on a computer?

smitty1110• 2 years ago

You should be able to with a PS3 and linux installed. You need a PS3 from one of the first two hardware revisions (the fat body ones), they dropped the expensive SACD reader to cut costs after that.

LeoPanthera4• 2 years ago

There’s custom firmware for Oppo blu-ray players to dump the raw DSD over Ethernet to a listening PC.

m-i-l• 2 years ago

"I have some SACDs but can't actually play them, even though my dac can do the audio. Is there some way to put the tracks on a computer?"

As per the other comments, it is technically possible, but not exactly straightforward: if you have access to a compatible BluRay player, you can create a special bootable USB stick, boot the player from that, connect to the player over the network, and use an SACD client to extract the ISO and/or DSF files containing the DSD data. You probably won't be able to play these directly on your media server, but you can use ffmpeg to convert to e.g. 24-bit/88.2kHz FLAC files. If you're interested, I wrote up the process I followed (with links to original sources) at https://www.michael-lewis.com/posts/extracting-multichannel-... .

coretx2• 2 years ago

>the never stuff is written from... Or PCM. Never forget that DSD is a trojan horse for DRM mechanics. It's neither in the producer or consumers interest.

zettabomb• 2 years ago

Care to explain why? DSD is just another way to store a bitstream.

mtillman2• 2 years ago

DSD does contain copy protection and forces digital (other than hdmi) output to PCM.

mrob3• 2 years ago

Looking at waveforms can be misleading because of the frequency-dependent sensitivity of the human ear:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-loudness_contour

It's possible the vinyl version just has less bass, and doesn't sound noticeably more dynamic. The waveforms might look more similar after high-pass filtering at 100Hz or so.

sfwf• 2 years ago

True, this is how the CD track looks after applying 100Hz high-pass filter and volume normalization https://i.imgur.com/lxMMDxd.png

bjt12345• 2 years ago

Good point, Vinyl can't have stereo bass - it makes the needle jump.

bscphil• 2 years ago

Yep. In fact the argument that the article makes, when applied generally across all vinyl records (I can't speak for the specific one they're talking about), is a common myth that the HydrogenAudio wiki debunks: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)#My...

Article: "It’s the data on the record that’s superior, and it’s a conscious choice made by today’s artists and producers."

HydrogenAudio:

A related myth is that when vinyl has a higher dynamic range than CD, it means the audio was sourced from a different, more dynamic master, and that the difference in dynamics will be audible.
It is true that recordings on vinyl sometimes have a spikier waveform and a measurably higher dynamic range than their counterparts on CD, at least when the dynamic range is reported by crude "DR meter" tools that compare peak and RMS levels. The higher "DR value" could indeed be a result of entirely different master recordings being provided to the mastering engineers for each format, or different choices made by the engineers, as happens every time old music is remastered for a new release.
But even when the same source master is used, the audio is normally further processed when mastering for the target format (be it CD or vinyl), and this often results in vinyl having a spikier waveform and higher DR measurement.

mikae1• 2 years ago

Didn't LUFS and streaming services stop the loudness wars?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36880962

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/end-loudness-war

mrob3• 2 years ago

Sadly, loudness war mastering is still common. People still listen to music in cars and on phone speakers. Low dynamic range sounds better with noisy listening environments and bad playback equipment.

user_78322• 2 years ago

Perhaps maybe not a super recent example but I remember Bruno Mar's 24k magic sounding very "loud"/compressed.

leokennis2• 2 years ago

Extremely anecdotal, but if I compare top 40 pop from the early 2000’s (Black Eyed Peas, Anastacia, Maroon 5) with stuff from today (Ariana Grande etc.) then the old music sounds like boomy maximalism while the new music usually has crisper drums, more subtle details etc.

apecat2• 2 years ago

A lot of present-day mastering can technically remain loud while sounding a lot less harsh. That's thanks to aesthetic mixing choices and at least in part due to audio processing and tools like plugins from Oeksound (Soothe) and others, which are used on nearly all top-selling music now https://oeksound.com

I find that the likes of Ariana Grande have a lot more air in their music those 00s acts you describe, while still being quite loud. So do my absolute favorite artists Tame Impala, Caroline Polachek and Dua Lipa.

Commercially this probably works out with better headphones and earbuds as a default listening mode, as opposed to things like the 00s earbuds delivered with digital music players and early smartphones.

That first Billy Eilish record would probably not have been a hit if the target audience was getting their first impression of new music in cars driving at highway speeds.

squarefoot2• 2 years ago

Yeah, loudness war is a plague, but vinyl and CD differences have nothing to do with it; it's just incompetent producers and sound engineers aiming at making their work more loud to attract listeners.

I miss vinyl records for only one thing: big sleeves and their art.

wolrah• 2 years ago

but vinyl and CD differences have nothing to do with it; it's just incompetent producers and sound engineers aiming at making their work more loud to attract listeners.

The physical limitations of vinyl don't allow it to be pushed as hard as a digital medium, or even tape, can be.

It's kind of like making a road that only allows air-cooled VWs and noting that speeding drops to almost zero.

ZiiS• 2 years ago

Till someone makes a Porsche.

pgeorgi• 2 years ago

If everybody went for vinyl, they'd bring the loudness war over as far as it's possible (the medium is more limited).

Right now, sound engineers, not incompetent at all, optimize CDs for the CD audience (and for the most part, they preferentially buy "louder," even if they'd deny it if you ask) and vinyl for those freaks who maintain their diamond needle.

So vinyl sounds better _because_ it's a hipster medium.

copperx• 2 years ago

optimize CDs for the CD audience

CDs haven't been on anyone's radar for a long time.

eyelidlessness• 2 years ago

Yeah, loudness war is a plague, but vinyl and CD differences have nothing to do with it; it's just incompetent producers and sound engineers aiming at making their work more loud to attract listeners.

The claim (not directly made by the article, but generally made to support the difference) is that vinyl’s physical characteristics limit how “loud” a recording can be. Specifically, that a vinyl pressing of a “brick walled” recording becomes unplayable—or at least unreliably playable—because its physical tracks are insufficient to keep a stylus in place for playback.

I don’t know how true that claim is, but the analysis seems cromulent, and analysis of comparable media seems to support it well enough.

It isn’t a claim that pressing vinyl attracts or requires better production etc, but that the medium has inherent physical constraints that benefit, at least as a side effect, from greater dynamic range.

starkparker• 2 years ago

It's quite true. Vinyl mastering is very different from digital, or even mastering for tape or other analog formats. Sibilance is terrifying in vinyl mastering. The properties of different groove lengths influence track order on albums because tolerances are different on the outer end of the record than the inner end, and you can squeeze out more fidelity by sacrificing duration with wider grooves.

There are a few general tricks here: https://www.sageaudio.com/articles/how-to-master-for-vinyl but in practice there are so many variables that vinyl mastering engineers are worth their weight in gold, and there's some significant investment made in trying to automate most of all of it algorithmically or via ML/AI.

empath-nirvana• 2 years ago

There are a lot of 'old school' edm records in online stores that were redigitized from vinyl, and you can tell just looking at the wave forms the difference in how they were mastered, and they sound noticeably _worse_ than modern EDM records, with much less powerful bass. It's actually sort of interesting how they worked around that with more dynamics in older records to make the bass pop more, but I'm not sure that it's better over all, it's just different.

pyinstallwoes• 2 years ago

Try to make a sine wave at E very loud and boomy on a Vinyl record. Techno is notorious for being difficult to print right, but entirely possible when one knows what they're doing. Mono, phase cancellation issues, yadda yada. When you get to 40 Hz apparently the needle will hop into lanes it shouldn't track on.

JKCalhoun2• 2 years ago

Vinyl records employ RIAA equalization [1] to attenuate the bass when mastering. As mentioned, this is to keep the needle from literally jumping out of the groove during playback of low frequencies. A phono-preamp is generally the way you reverse the RIAA equalization, recover the bass, when listening.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization

dtgriscom2• 2 years ago

A friend had a vinyl copy of The 1812 Overture. At the point where the cannons started firing, they increased the groove spacing to allow the full dynamic range. Unfortunately, you could see where my friend's needle had taken shortcuts across the biggest transients.

coldtea• 2 years ago

but vinyl and CD differences have nothing to do with it

The kind of do. With vinyl if you master like this you're making the grooves (the paths where the needle runs in) more pronounced, meaning less space for music (which is a premium in CDs compared to streaming, and even more so to vinyl compared to CDs: many vinyl "double albums" could have beeen a single CD). And it can make the needle jump around or have issues too.

So vinyl kind of forces you to master with actual dynamics, as opposed to squashing everything.

aidos• 2 years ago

Big sleeves and art, but for me it’s the ceremony. I just love taking that time to really appreciate what you’re about to listen to. Filtering along the spines and having something jump out that grabs you and you know it’s the album for now.

Yeah, there’s probably a compromise in quality, but for me the experience is just better.

I miss my vinyl collection a lot. Really wish it was easier to ship it to the other side of the world but I’ve struggled to find a way.

bamboozled2• 2 years ago

Some people actually like "Material objects". I personally do. A well made tool, nice suit, a nice pen and piece of paper a leather lounge, and of course a nicely printed record cover and the feeling of loading the thing in the player.

I think society has lost a bit of that with digital stuff.

m4633• 2 years ago

I remember getting the albums out of the sleeves, then the paper inner sleeve. Then spraying shooting my discwasher with an anti-static gun. I think there was a special deionized water you could drip on it too. Then you would clean around the disk and put it on the turntable. I had an automatic turntable, I wasn't into dropping the needle on the disk by hand.

sasaf5• 2 years ago

plus: no logins, no algorithms, no endless random play until end of time, no ads, no tracking, no buggy pairings, no subscriptions, no DRM, no licensing issues.

ThinkingGuy• 2 years ago

I grew up in cassette tape era, but they shared a characteristic with vinyl: albums had 2 sides, providing a "break" or "intermission" between sides. Many artists would purposely arrange the songs on an album to account for the break in the middle, or group sets of similar songs on the same side (I receall several Duran Duran albums having the radio friendly singles on side 1, and the more ethereal, experimental-sounding songs on side 2).

RachelF• 2 years ago

It's been happening for a long time. Back when one had to rip CDs I was surprised by how many recordings clipped. It wasn't just pop, good classical studios like Deutshe Gramaphon also did it.

JKCalhoun2• 2 years ago

I miss when they designed the ordering of tracks to complement a side 1 and side 2.

dtgriscom2• 2 years ago

I miss vinyl records for only one thing: big sleeves and their art.

I had a copy of Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk". Double-album in a hinged sleeve, with each album having an inner sleeve. That gave eight big surfaces for art, and they certainly used it. Lovely.

kimi• 2 years ago

If they do it, they are not "incompetent"; it's just that is what people want/expect. You cannot afford to be the quiet piece after an ultra-powwah one when on radio on streaming....

ghusto• 2 years ago

Fixed title: Vinyl Can't be Abused as Badly as Higher Quality Mediums Such as CDs.

Also, this only effects recent stuff, after the "loudness wars" started.

dylan604• 2 years ago

"recent stuff" is somewhat relative. the loudness war has been fought on other fronts than just CDs/mp3s. my cassette player from the 80s had a loudness button. the sales rep at Guitar Center bragged about the easiest one-button sale for a 1RU piece of gear to add to your rack that made your sound better. it was just a loudness on/off button. so it was playback device dependent at that time which allowed the listener to choose it. they just moved the battle field to format itself and took away the choice

mrob3• 2 years ago

The "loudness" button on old equipment is actually a combined bass and treble boost, designed to the make the music sound louder at low listening levels by compensating for the effects of the equal loudness contour. It's a great idea for anybody who cares about protecting their hearing. You can do even better using modern DSP by equalizing to a curve based on the difference between the equal loudness contour at your preferred listening level and the equal loudness contour several decibels louder.

LeoPanthera4• 2 years ago

These nicer masters tend to also be used on other audiophile digital formats, such as "High resolution" downloads, Super Audio CDs, DVD-Audio, and other niche formats.

coretx2• 2 years ago

But unlike Vinyl those are designed to rot away over time. When you buy vinyl, you can rip & use it and store the vinyl somewhere save without having to worry about losing it,ever.

kstrauser• 2 years ago

I can’t tell if this is serious or satire.

If serious, LOL. You most assuredly cannot use vinyl, a medium that physically wears out a little bit every time you listen to it, forever.

Source: owned hundreds of LPs over the years. Also, just look at it.

LeoPanthera4• 2 years ago

You can “rip” all these formats (downloads are of course “pre-ripped”) and the physical formats I mentioned are definitely not designed to rot. Unlike Vinyl, they also sound exactly the same each time you play them, since they are not worn by the playback head.

itronitron2• 2 years ago

Interesting, both 15 second segments sound like the same garbage to me.

CharlesW3• 2 years ago

Yes, the first re-compressed CD segment sounds so much worse than the iTunes version that I'm not sure what to think. Two possibilities: (1) The album was remastered for a subsequent CD reissue. (2) I'm hearing the benefits of the "Apple Digital Masters"¹ process.

¹ https://www.apple.com/apple-music/apple-digital-masters/

itronitron2• 2 years ago

I occasionally play a used CD of Bob Marley's Legend album in the car and the clarity of the music is so much greater than any of the current songs playing on the radio. Not sure if it's a measure of the quality of the artist, the producer, or the technology.

ricardobeat3• 2 years ago

Apple Digital Masters is the real deal. The quality difference is noticeable even on modern pop songs, especially when compared to Spotify.

bwanab2• 2 years ago

I love Radiohead, but I really couldn't tell the difference either.

OJFord• 2 years ago

I was going to say the same, but I listened on my phone so I thought (interestingly) that might be why - will try to remember to listen on good speakers later

Animats• 2 years ago

"You don't want your CD to be the quietest one in the stack" - some writer on mastering in the 1990s.

gizajob• 2 years ago

Vinyl actually has quite a limited bandwidth too, so what you gain by not having digital limiting, you often lose by only having a small amount of dynamic range.

LeoPanthera4• 2 years ago

The dynamic range also reduces as you get closer to the center of the record because the linear tracking speed reduces. Some albums had to have their tracks rearranged so that the louder tracks weren't near the end.

cesaref• 2 years ago

Whatever you may think is wrong with vinyl, limited bandwidth isn't the problem - it's totally possible to get 50Khz onto a record, and there were even quadraphonic recordings made by modulating an extra two channels into these otherwise unused higher frequency ranges.

Dynamic range may be what you mean? It's around 70-80db, which is good enough for most things, certainly when records are new and/or undamaged so surface noise is lower.

giantrobot• 2 years ago

certainly when records are new and/or undamaged so surface noise is lower.

Then you play them once and the record forever has surface noise. The best part, it only gets worse the more you listen! I've yet to have a CD ruined by the laser in a CD player.

CharlesW3• 2 years ago

The Audacity waveform rendering is a bit misleading because each pixel is reflecting the peak of nearly 10,000 samples. Here's a higher-resolution look ("Open Image in New Tab" and click to zoom for detail) at one segment of the track:

https://imgur.com/a/7mncY77

From the waveform analysis, you can see that the LRA of the selected segment is fairly narrow at 2.1 LU, but the dynamic range is quite high at 38.59 dB. The effect is minimal variation in music intensity, but a substantial difference between the quietest and loudest sounds in that segment.

I'd guess that the degree to which this causes ear sparkles is probably not achievable when mastering to plastic.

ternaryoperator• 2 years ago

Mandatory New Yorker cartoon (2015): www.ratherrarerecords.com/wp-content/uploads/AlexGregory_cartoon_vinyl_1000.jpg

dredmorbius• 2 years ago

Linkified: https://www.ratherrarerecords.com/wp-content/uploads/AlexGre...

musicale2• 2 years ago

On the rare occasions I hear vinyl being played I'm surprised at how good it sounds. It shouldn't sound good, but it does.

derwiki• 2 years ago

Can you elaborate on why you think so?

I’ve always said that vinyl sounds “warmer” but that is a squishy term that I can’t really elaborate on.

badgersnake2• 2 years ago

A decent amplifier and speakers probably. People tend to spend money on their vinyl setup. CD played through the same setup would also sound good.

user_78322• 2 years ago

I’ve always said that vinyl sounds “warmer” but that is a squishy term that I can’t really elaborate on.

I think it is at least partly due to a reduced top end/treble. Though googling something like "why does vinyl sound warmer" will give more information. Sites like ASR forums or diyaudio will help if you want to get more technical.

musicale2• 2 years ago

I'm not sure. Adjectives like warm (or maybe smoother and less brittle) usually mean less high end, but I don't think that's all there is to it. I think part of it may be good mastering without overcompression or clipping, and good instrument tone and arrangement (and probably equalization) - with discernible bass, midrange, and highs (though cymbals and high end can get sanded off with repeated plays I guess.) Better playback systems (vs. bluetooth speakers etc.) may also be helping. The number of tracks and stereo image might be helping. And maybe there's some kind of synergy between vinyl-era popular music and its recording media - bands that sounded good on vinyl probably sold more records, etc.

On the other hand, I am sometimes blown away by the dynamic range of good classical CDs.

Also: has FM radio gotten worse in sound quality?

possibleworlds• 2 years ago

This is an amazingly in depth resource that touches on this topic:

https://magicvinyldigital.net/blog/

Projectiboga• 2 years ago

Digital is only part of the audio waveform. CD especially is based on 1970s digital audio processing, not even professional quality. Vinyl is a full waveform. Much fuller, bass, drums, and voices.

pie314isi• 2 years ago

what a load of crap. every sentence is bullshit.

sushibowl• 2 years ago

Technically speaking, there is just no discussion to be had. CD from its very first release offered an orders of magnitude better, more faithful reproduction of a recording than vinyl.

- better signal/noise ratio. Cutting a groove inevitably has limited precision and the waveform will have imperfections. CD is a perfect reproduction each time. - wear and tear. Every time the needle moves through the groove, imperfections will get worse and more noise is added. CD has error correction built in and even scratching doesn't affect quality (up to a certain point) - playback speed deviation: CD doesn't suffer from wow/flutter effects - quality of vinyl decreases toward the inside of the record

Just because the storage medium is analog doesn't translate into a more faithful reproduction of the sound. It mostly leads to more opportunities for distortion and noise.

scns• 2 years ago

There is a free plugin by Tokyo Dawn Labs that lets you play with vinyls limitations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqL3WjWYbY8

znpy• 2 years ago

I listened to the two 15-seconds sample from cd and vinyl... I couldn't tell the difference. I tried playing back and forth with the controls... Still no difference.

I'm playing the music on an m1 macbook pro (so not a cheap-ass machine) and I tried with and without my headset (sennheiser, so not really a cheap-ass headset).

Not sure what to make of this.

It does add a bit to my "audiophiles are gullible people" suspect though.

leephillips• 2 years ago

I didn’t hear a difference either. I think the reason is explained in the comment by mrob above. Obviously the author believes he can hear a clear difference. I wonder if he blind tested himself.

matchamatcha• 2 years ago

To me, the vinyl sample sounded a bit 'louder', but as I understood the article, it should be the opposite way?

apecat2• 2 years ago

You are very unlikely to hear a difference like this on laptop speakers. Present-day Apple laptop speakers are great feats of engineering for what they are, but they use a bunch of trickery to create the illusion of bass and such. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental

Even with decent headphones, the difference between these samples isn't trivial to spot, unless you have moderately trained ears.

I'm not an audio professional but I have a great interest in this space. My first impression is that the the bass in the second sample stands out a bit more in the mix, perhaps thanks to higher dynamic range. The high range is muted and the mid range in the percussion and such may be more pronounced.

That's not to say you're wrong about audiophiles. A lot of claims made by this subculture are nonsense and especially not applicable to situations where an everyday person seeks some improvement to their audio reproduction.

For example, lossy audio codecs have a bad reputation among certain people, due to old technology. Mp3 is undoubtedly garbage, 90s tech. If I waste a bunch of time on blind tests, I can spot even a 320 kbps mp3 sample with my regular listening headphones. Lower bitrates are a lot more obvious to spot.

However, this problem is gone for almost all people in most listening environments, mine included. This is thanks to the more modern lossy delivery codecs at decent bitrates, as employed by the the premium tiers of the big streaming services, which are Vorbis (Spotify) and AAC (Apple and most others) and Opus (Youtube Music in some circumstances).

Archival and editing copies of audio should obviously be lossless. Generational loss over lossy media are as real with digital re-encodes as with analog tape.

A regular person who wants to improve their listening experience can easily get decent headphones now. However, anyone who wants to invest in a better shared listening experience than a decent portable mono Bluetooth speaker can offer, should probably start by thinking through the the acoustics of the room they want to listen in.

This doesn't have to be fancy, just having shelves with actual books on the walls in the direction looking towards a speaker system does a lot.

Spending more than 200 USD on speakers in a room with blank walls is ridiculous, unless it's a log cabin. Those actually sound great.

arbitrage• 2 years ago

Not sure what to make of this.

One possible conclusion here is that you are not as discriminating of a music listener as you assumed or thought you were.

tacocataco• 2 years ago

One thing about vinyl that I've noticed is that you don't have a play list, you listen to the whole album. No one puts on a vinyl record to play one song.

I used to have a huge folder where I dumped all my music files and I would have them play at random. When I streamed online, I would have a play list or pick one song at a time.

Lately I've been going through some of my favorite arists and listening to each of their albums in chronological order.

Listening to the entire album as the artist intended is just a little different and it's how I play music for myself now. Perhaps people like vinyl because it encourages listening to the entire album in one sitting.

euroderf• 2 years ago

Excellent point! So how tough to program a playlist to play sets of three by artists...

anta40• 2 years ago

Well that's the same mindset when listening to casettes, yes? Except choosing a specific track on vinyl is a bit tougher: you have to move the needle to certain position...

jimlikeslimes• 2 years ago

Skipping tracks on vinyl is super easy, especially compared to fast-forward or rewind on casette.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF5toXl3H3c

dTal• 2 years ago

Choosing a specific track is easier on vinyl than cassette, not tougher; there are often visual cues, and you can seek in constant time rather than linear. It takes a steady hand to be sure, but I'll take it any day over fast forwarding / rewinding some arbitrary amount, hunting for the start by sound...

(There are cassette players that can stop winding when they detect silence, and that helps, but they fail on albums with gapless mixing. Admittedly such albums are also difficult to seek by sight on vinyl. On the other hand, there are vinyl players with motorized arms that obviate the need for a steady hand, at the cost of introducing a linear term in seek time, albeit still faster than cassettes.)

uxp100• 2 years ago

Someone else posted video of a DJ, but to emphasize, home listeners select tracks on a vinyl record easily, it’s not a DJ trick. The songs are often marked, dropping the needle in the marked groove selects the start of the song. You’ve got a cue lever that lets you align the arm first then drop, but even without one you can hit the beginning of the track with your hand easily (I broke my cue lever 15 years ago and rarely think about fixing it)

So the premise of this whole thread that it is hard to select songs and this is a difference of vinyl records is kinda just made up. I select songs all the time.

You do have to stand up though, no remote or phone app to do it.

ghaff• 2 years ago

One nit. When I listened to vinyl in school it was actually very common for many people to prefer a specific side of an album. (And you're right, you almost always listened to at least that side from start to finish.) If you wanted to mix things up more, you made a mix tape.

ADDED: There were 45rpm singles (typically A and B side) too of course but those were pretty uncommon by the time I was an undergrad. When CDs came in people mostly listened to the whole album as was also the case with cassettes.

RIMR• 2 years ago

No one puts on a vinyl record to play one song.

Uh, ever heard of a DJ?

IshKebab2• 2 years ago

That's clearly a specific case that they weren't talking about.

Separately, when people say "nobody does this" they aren't literally saying 0.0000% of people.

It's perfectly ok to say "nobody commutes by helicopter". It isn't a clever riposte to say "aha but Jeff Bezos...".

stinos• 2 years ago

No one puts on a vinyl record to play one song.

Pretty much every DJ out there begs to differ :) I get your point though, and do also like to listen to whole albums (be it on vinyl or cd or PC), sometimes. Other times I prefer to create the playlist on the spot in function of my mood, i.e. select one track after the other. 'DJ' if you will, except I don't usually do proper mixing as that can take away part of the 'just listening' experience.

magicalhippo2• 2 years ago

Foobar2000 lists my music per album. So I double click and put on an album.

In Spotify I do the same, I favorite artists or albums, and I put on an album. Thanks to Adele[1] I get the album played in order.

That said, I agree there's something special about putting on a record, sitting down and just listening to an album. Especially albums where it's clear the artist/band has had some thought behind the album structure.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-59365019

eimrine2• 2 years ago

Can foobar2000 play 1 album in cycle?

analog31• 2 years ago

The "volume wars" predate CDs, but tended to be fought by the radio stations themselves. Virtually every radio station (I worked in college radio) had a dynamic processor that managed signal levels for maximum loudness. The conventional wisdom was that people would choose the loudest station when listening in their cars. Commercials were mixed as loud as possible too.

The use of compression in this way may have emanated from the fact that the station already needed to have a compressor limiter in the signal chain, to prevent overmodulation, which could earn you a fine from the FCC. I was told to dial the compressor to within a gnat's ass of 100% modulation.

How the two recordings sound in your phone or laptop might be clouded by those devices also processing your sound to make tiny speakers sound louder.

A popular processor was the Orban Optimod, so I checked to see if it's still in production, nearly 40 years later:

https://www.orban.com/optimodfm-8700i

Ironically, the new model claims that it "brings hyper-compressed music back to life."

justincormack• 2 years ago

Also the Aphex Compellor.

subpar• 2 years ago

The conventional wisdom was that people would choose the loudest station when listening in their cars.

But also, the louder your station is the wider your FM broadcast, so you can really fill out the FCC-allowed +/- 0.15 MHz on either side of your allotted channel.

xbar• 2 years ago

The 2nd audio clip sounded more pleasant to me.

pkkm3• 2 years ago

Anecdotally, I can confirm. I remember listening to a vinyl rip of Opeth's Blackwater Park because the CD version's dynamic range has been butchered enough that it more than made up for vinyl's technical inferiority.

However, now that most people have moved to streaming services, I think that CDs may become the audiophile/hipster format of choice. They have the advantages of vinyl - being able to physically touch your collection and look at the cover art, generally no DRM, the nostalgia factor of using old technology - while also having near-perfect quality and not degrading with every listen.

tambourine_man• 2 years ago

Maybe it’s time to hit up your local record store.

No, it’s time to end the loudness war or offer an option with the full dynamic range for those that care.

buildsjets• 2 years ago

What a silly article. Of course headroom and compression is manipulated and optimized by the recording engineer when mastering for vinyl, sometimes to good results and sometimes to bad. A skilled engineer will know how to make any recording medium sound optimized, a schmo will phone it it and either under or over use compression, to poor results in either case regardless of media.

For example, I own two different 1969 pressings of Led Zeppelin II, both from the same pressing plant, but made from different masters. One pressing was mastered by the mighty Robert Ludwig. It uses extensive compression and barely leaves any headroom. The sound is rich, full, and driving. It sounds great on medium to high-end turntables, but caused cheap ones to skip due to the bass excursions. After a week on the market Atlantic Records recalled it an replaced it with a version they remastered internally, which leaves plenty of headroom but sounds puny and pathetic in comparison. Guess which one collectors value today?

https://www.discogs.com/release/4699428-Led-Zeppelin-Led-Zep...

https://www.discogs.com/release/8753624-Led-Zeppelin-Led-Zep...

https://nowspinning.co.uk/led-zeppelin-robert-ludwig-the-str...

On the flip side, my original pressing of "Are You Experienced" is pretty terrible compared to the remastered pressing that was authorized by the Hendrix family in 2014, so choose modern over vintage on that one.

nemo44x• 2 years ago

Similarly a lot of not as popular old music has never been remastered properly for new formats and this is one of the reasons collectors of old vinyl are often on to something. A lot of it was created from vinyl masters and sounds sub-optimal in digital form.

Interesting fact regarding Zep ][, thanks!

A Surprising Advantage of Vinyl (2011)

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