> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Idk if it’s true but supposedly in the the Telarc recording, the cannon fire went down to like 7Hz and would blow out your speakers if the signal wasn’t filtered.
With things like 1812 one of the problems was not always recognized back when vinyl was king.
The recording can be so realistic it captures the actual earth moving along with the heavier-than-normal sound waves hitting the microphones.
The bigger speakers and higher power amplifiers were always favored to reproduce the shock waves, and that's what happened.
It was the speakers' high volume not the smallness of the micro-groove that pushed the needle off the record and it emphasized the need for far better isolation of the turntable during the reproduction process than was needed for the microphone during the recording process.
A well calibrated turntable pickup/arm will not jump until you turn it up past a certain point, but that point is much lower when it's the 1812 Overture, and you don't really need an audiophile setup to shake things when the source material captures that to begin with.
OTOH with radio-friendly pop music a dancer or two in an upstairs room could make the needle jump to the next song on the disc :(
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.