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  • Another reason that no one has really mentioned here is that mastering tracks for vinyl is different from mastering for digital/CD/streaming in such a way that the tracks basically have to have some amount of dynamic range due to the physical limitations of a needle riding in a groove. Since the late 2000s, the major labels have been stuck in sort of a "loudness war" where they brickwall the shit out of every mix and/or master so that it is as loud as possible for the duration of the song, thus forcing anyone within earshot of a radio or muzak system to listen to whatever is playing. With vinyl, mastering engineers tend to be a little more careful, since brickwalled tracks can cause the needle to skip/bounce.

    Unfortunately, sometimes it's still not enough to fix a final mix engineers' fuckups, e.g., with Metallica's Death Magnetic. The original mix/master of that thing is a brickwalled clusterfuck -- you can hear the mix pumping, clipping, and farting out on snare hits, and the vinyl sounds just as bad, because mastering engineers can only polish a turd so much.

    • I like old music. Particularly rock from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s. Jazz from the 1950s, 1960s. A lot of music over the last 30 years or so drive me crazy and I hate it. I use an equalizer when I watch movies because the TOO LOUD / TOO QUIET problem is even more annoying. Usually equalizing does the trick. But some damn tv series figured out an extra-annoying way of making songs TOO LOUD so I either turn down the volume or skip the scene.

      I'll leave this here.

      Loudness war

      The loudness war (or loudness race) is a trend of increasing audio levels in recorded music, which reduces audio fidelity and—according to many critics—listener enjoyment. Increasing loudness was first reported as early as the 1940s, with respect to mastering practices for 7-inch singles. The maximum peak level of analog recordings such as these is limited by varying specifications of electronic equipment along the chain from source to listener, including vinyl and Compact Cassette players. The issue garnered renewed attention starting in the 1990s with the introduction of digital signal processing capable of producing further loudness increases.

    • I have not located a CD that sounds exactly as good as a canadian issue Dreamboat Annie LP.

      • Yeah; I've noticed over the years that a lot of those mid-80s CD reissues of albums released in the 70s and early 80s just sound like sterile ass because they more or less printed the studio's archival masters to CD format. The assumption was that if you had a CD player, you must be some kind of mega-rich audiophile, and therefore you also must have an outboard equalizer, and it would be untoward for the mastering engineer to make assumptions about how much bass you want coming out of your bespoke quadrophonic setup. The mentality shifted drastically by around 1991-92 which, incidentally, was around the same time everyone realized that they could cram a pair of boxed subwoofers and a Rockford Fosgate amp into their rusted out Pontiac Grand Ams.

        But yeah, growing up listening to the first two Dio albums on cassette (so many times that I had to transplant the tape at least twice) and then hearing the same albums on CD for the first time was pretty underwhelming because of the aforementioned "just print the DAT masters to CD" approach. I guess my shitty Emerson shelf system wasn't bespoke enough.

        Edit: It's also really difficult for those earlier masters because if the studio doesn't have the original tracks from prior to the mastering stage, their options are really limited as far as what they can do on a remaster, and even then, a lot of drum recordings tended to be just two room mics aimed down at the kit, so you can't really go back and isolate kick/snare/cymbals/toms and apply different volume, panning, EQ, and compression to each track to give the other instruments more "space." Track extraction tooling has gotten pretty damned fancy in the past 3-5 years, though, so it might be possible now, if the digital artifacting isn't too obvious.

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