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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When someone claims that vinyl has less than half the DR of a CD then I think it's important to clarify how big of a difference it actually is. I would imagine HN would care about 16bits vs aprox 10bits of dynamic range.
I keep 3 pressings of Led Zep II out so I can demonstrate the difference to people who don’t believe that there is one. A first-week Robert Ludwig mastered version, a second-week pressing of the Ahmet Ertegun disaster, and 1977 remaster that really sounds just as good as the 1969 RL mix and is a lot cheaper. $20 for a VG+ copy compared to $1300. I am not insane so I did not spend $1300 on a used vinyl record, I found mine for $2 at Goodwill.
Even if you think in purely transactional terms like "asset currently worth $1300", what's wrong with holding onto an asset? Especially one that's likely to appreciate, not depreciate, as long as you look after it carefully.
It's the thought process you learn by having some financial issues in life. You feel guilty for owning expensive things instead of selling them to buy other things.
I have the same problems with trading cards I own from a long time ago that are now expensive, I can keep them for sentimental reasons or sell them to put it towards some bill
If you think its insane to spend that amount of money on it (essentially: it's not worth that much to you), then you holding onto it instead of having $1300 is pretty much the exact same scenario? By holding onto it you're saying it is worth that much to you.
It sounds like believing you hunted down a 'deal' causes you to wildly change how you perceive value at an emotional level.
I would probably do the same thing. It's just funny to see expressed on HN where everybody complains that advertising and marketing are evil/scams and proclaims loudly how rational they are.
He wants the thing. He does not value the thing at 1300 dollars so he would not buy it for 1300 dollars. He found it for a lower value, he kept it because the point at the start was he wanted the thing.
On the topic of HN users, is it our collective first day on earth?
it could simply be that you value owning the object in terms other than money. sentimental reasons, completionism tendencies, novelty, some other "non-rational"/emotional reason; any of these can have a stronger pull on the mind than $1300 to someone who doesn't immediately need the cash for survival. i have some records like this (not in that price-range but still) along with a few other collectible items (some rare handmade keycaps that were going for over $500 a piece at one point) that I refuse to part with for money because i just... like them :)
The point is it's irrational behavior. And we all do it.
It's burning $5 in gas and $20 in time to go to a store further away and save $25 on a sale item. And then proudly bragging "I'm not like those idiots who pay full price!"
OP didn't find a record...he found a $1300 arbitrage, then decided to spend the proceeds on the record by keeping it.
In other words, this is why selling stuff to consumers is a nightmare.
You have to trick them into believing they "won one over" on everybody else, via discounting and promotions, no matter if ultimately they're the ones losing by spending hours of their time jumping through hoops on a product that they legitimately value at full price.
> On the topic of HN users, is it our collective first day on earth?
The disease of financialization at work. Money is all that matters to people, everything is converted into money. It's only value is what you could get from selling it, and/or what you spent to acquire it.
Like those weird fuckers who buy $200k supercars so they can sit in a damn garage. (She said, having put 30k miles on a Corvette inside of 3 years)
I don’t see any sign they own the original pressing which is $1300. Instead they own the 1977 remaster which apparently sounds as good as the original pressing though I don’t own the original. The 1977 remaster sells for between $5 and $50 depending on grade. I paid $3 for mine and it might be worth $25 or $30 of if I did a lot of leg work.
You’re making a lot of assumptions here in your thinking. The first one is that you can just randomly turn around and sell that record for $1300. Hitting those peaks usually only happens with in person sales or amongst collectors who know each other well. It’s incredibly expensive to get to that point and requires thousands of hours of work. For a normal person without extensive contacts, it’s still a lot of leg work for a fraction of that price. That might yield maybe $30 an hour.
Some people value their time higher than that; it’s really not that deep.
Emotionally, it feels different. It's fascinating to see downright angry gut reactions!
A few years ago my friend was selling his expensive camera on Kijiji. I asked him to sell it to me for slightly less as a friendly discount. He told me that's the same as just randomly one day giving me a wad of cash, so why would he do that?? I thought he's crazy and was a little bit offended. Actually maybe a fair bit offended!
It took me YEARS to realize that 1. He's absolutely completely Inarguably correct, and 2. People would find me no less crazy if I adopted same perspective.
Buy for $x, have and not sell for $x, same mathematically. But oh boy will people get instantly riled up emotionally :).
I'd be inclined to pay more for it getting it from my friend than on a second hand marketplace. It removes the chance I'm going to be scammed, or the product isn't as described, or the seller will leave me a bad review.
On the other hand, I wouldn't ask my friend to pay more if selling, so maybe a par price is fair.
> Buy for $x, have and not sell for $x, same mathematically. But oh boy will people get instantly riled up emotionally :).
Price and value are not the same. The logic of your friend was basically putting a price on how "special" (or not) he saw your relationship versus some rando-buyer online.
That is why people (close to you) get riled up emotionally: they're being treated in a way no different than a complete stranger.
If you ask your friend for $100 for no particular reason, just because you want $100, that's an annoying request and "no" is a reasonable response. It's not putting a price on your relationship. It's technically the same answer they'd give a stranger, but that doesn't mean you're being treated like a stranger.
(I do think a slight discount often makes sense just because a friend is probably quicker and easier to deal with. But anything more substantial turns into asking for free stuff, and yes and no are both perfectly fine answers to that.)
That's the thing. This was a $3000 camera. A 20% friends discount is 600. We've been best friends for two decades, but most days he doesn't give me $600 on cash. Don't get me wrong, we don't keep track who paid for dinner or cinema ticket or whatever. But there IS a threshold at which it really becomes a random cash gift.
Yes dealing with friends is nicer than strangers - but also when you're selling stuff, sometimes it's better to do strangers. Expectations of long term service and support are clearer and have more defined boundaries.
I guess friendship means different things to different people. I've had friends spot me plenty more than $600 and I've spent thousands on friends in return. I can't imagine having such an indifferent attitude towards someone I care about.
"Buy for $x, have and not sell for $x, same mathematically."
Sort of. People are being less irrational than it sounds if you account for transaction costs. There's a lot of stuff I might "sell" if I could point a video-game-like pointer at it and right click and hit "sell", and it just instantly disappeared and money was credited to my bank account. Perhaps even more if buying was just as easy and I didn't need to hang on to something like my drill which I don't use very often and I could trivially "rent" it from the market by buying, using it, and selling in mere minutes.
But in practice one-off selling for anything less than $100 or so is a waste of time because there are significant transaction costs for one-off events like that.
Yes, strictly true, but friendship is worth it, no? Do you spend a couple of hours with a friend and then hand each other bills for the hours? Clearly there was a[n opportunity] cost to both of you, after all. Just spending time together without charging would be like randomly handing over a wad of cash ...
>Buy for $x, have and not sell for $x, same mathematically.
They're not the same.
£20 item to buy, I have £100; buying leaves me £80.
Either, I have £100; not buying/selling leaves me £100
£20 item I own, I have £100; selling leaves me £120.
In the first case maybe I can't make rent now. In the last case I have more cash, but then I need to spend money if I want entertainment/utility that the item had. In the first case I lose 25% of my cash; in the last I gain 20% (this matters when you're sharing your money across different needs).
If you're trying to make rent right now it makes a difference. In the long run it's looking at X income and comparing how much better/worse off you'd be with X-1 and X+1 income, and those two deltas are almost the same. The fluctuation in value of the object will make a bigger difference than the technicalities of buying versus selling.
> He thinks that way because it's the only correct way to think.
I typed up something, but ended up almost antagonistic. I realize I just feel sad that for some people money is literally the single goal in their life, seemingly nothing else matters.
Why? We know the price was $1300. Doesn't mean anyone would buy it for that much.
So try lowering the number and see what you think?
The value is what someone is willing to pay for it.
The logic is a little broken for me... If he really wanted the record, and got it for $2, why would he then sell it and then not have it? Replacing it would cost at least $1300.
You're logic is why so much in this world if fucking broken. Everything is a grift, a hustle, an opportunity for profit.
People are getting angry at the math here. I'm Not the OP and have no moral judgement here, but from strict bank account balance perspective it's the same. Persuade me otherwise through addition and subtraction, not moral appeals.
1. I have 10,000 in my bank account.
2. I see a 1,300 record I like
3. I buy it
4. My bank account now has 8700
5. There's 1,300 difference if I choose to buy it or not
1. I have 10,000 in my bank account
2. I have a 1,300 record
3. If I sell it my bank account will have 11,300
4. 1,300 difference if I choose to sell it or not
No "end of the world, this is what's wrong with everybody" gross hyperboles please, I don't care one iota about whether anybody buys or sells expensive records, I don't make any moral judgement whatsoever and would appreciate people in turn not making extreme assumptions about what I think about expensive records. But economically, buying an expensive item or selling expensive item is the same - Prove it wrong with numbers not appeals to emotion please.
> Prove it wrong with numbers not appeals to emotion please
But my point is that I don't care about the numbers. If fact my complaint was that it was made into a financial decision, just because the record happens to be worth $1300.
If it was a $10 record, bought used at $2, then few would argue that you should sell it and make $8. My argument is that it doesn't matter if you could make $8 or $1298, not if you enjoy the record and wish keep it. It's the defaulting to "You could make money" in so many of aspects of life that's starting to annoy me.
It's fine if you want to own and use an expensive thing.
The argument is not "you could make money", the argument is that if you got the expensive thing for free and choose not to sell then you're roughly as "insane" as the person that paid full price. Go ahead and splurge but try not to be a hypocrite about it. It's not lmm that was passing judgement, it was the person that owns the record passing judgement.
The thread started with calling those who buy a record at 1300, and I quote, insane. Argument was made that keeping a 1300 record is equally insane or not. That is the discussion here. It started about whether 1300 was sane or not. It was not turned into that discussion by people who hussle.
It is a massive massive massive privilege of us here to even ponder keeping a record we bought for 2 which could be sold for 1300. For a lot of other population this would be not even an argument.
Again, I don't actually care, but I do believe that mathematically, if one starts with assumption / claim that buying a 1300 record is insane, not selling it is equally insane (or not;). Crux of my argument is that two sides of that equation are equal, not whether we should consider that equation or not. I find it dishonest to make one side of the claim, but go all "modern culture is all about hussle!" When pointing the equivalence of the other side of the claim.
You are assuming symmetries where there are none. I want a thing, discover it's readily available for $1300, that seems insane, so I don't buy it. By chance I acquire the thing from a source that was unaware of its fair market value for $2, amazing deal. I have the thing without having to pay an insane price, I am happy. Now here comes an insane person who wants it enough to offer me $1300. Both parties must benefit from an exchange for there to be a transaction, but the benefit is always subjective to them, depends on public and private information, there's no symmetry in buying/selling, and the equations have inequalities rather than equal signs. Now if the offer is sufficiently higher than $1300, or I know I can find the thing again for sufficiently less, or I find myself in need of the $1298 unrealized gain for other things, then sure, it becomes insane to not sell, but absent such factors refusing a fair market offer at a price you wouldn't ever entertain paying yourself is not insane. Additionally, prices aren't static, platonic things. If someone is insane enough to offer $1300, perhaps they are insane enough to offer $2600 in a year, I will be enjoying the thing in the meantime.
This calculation is faulty because neglects all of the intangible value.
The reason anyone buys anything other than the minimum clothing, food, and shelter for mere survival is because of intangible value.
Any time you see someone who is not opting to optimize tangible value, it is likely that you are simply failing to observe some intangible value.
> Prove it wrong with numbers not appeals to emotion please.
This is a false dichotomy. Intangible value is not some fallacious appeal to emotion -- it is a real thing that economists overwhelmingly agree exists, but also recognize is difficult to put a number on.
friction and transaction costs exists in our world which are absolutely factors that would delineate the economic utility of purchasing a new luxury item from selling an already owned luxury item.
Spend $2.
Receive album worth $1000.
Make $300 an hour at job.
Have no immediate use case for $1000 in cash.
Have somewhat immediate want for music on that album.
Time to sell album with high quality images/ description, deal with questions from discerning buyers (tire-kickers), post the album: 4 hours
Opportunity cost- $1,200
Sale value - $1000
Replacement album cost - $20
Deciding to sell would put this hypothetical guy down $220 vs just listening to his cool, potential appreciating album and working for the same amount of time.
I don't think it's useful to account for time spent outside of work by the same hourly income as a way to measure how much something costs. By that logic, spending an hour listening would also "cost" $300.
I prefer to buy original releases of CDs second hand on Discogs. I then digitize them with Exact Audio Copy.
I never bought into the recent vinyl hype. Though I really like the beautiful design of many new vinyl releases, I don't think they are for being played. But I used to buy new and used vinyl as a teenager to actually listen to them, and occasionally I still buy used vinyl. Vinyl records from the flea market were as cheap as 1€, so that was an efficient way to grow my music collection before file sharing was a thing.
But now I prefer CDs because what really interests me is the music itself and I simply prefer the version with the best mastering. That's often CD releases from the early 1980s to mid 1990s.
And yes, I still buy music because I don't trust music streaming to be around forever. At least I think there is a real chance CDs will outlast individual services for sure. And in case the internet gets shut down because of war, at least I still have music as long as I have power.
This. I'm 55. My teenage years were in the 1980s, where CDs started to appear but vinyl was still mainstream. I remember Dad having a significant vinyl library and I also got my own collection.
But I hated caring for that thing. The medium is finicky, prone to scratches and whatnot, and CDs had more length and also more range and better sound. So as soon as I was able to get CDs, I got rid of my vinyl collection faster than one does it with a hot potato in their hands. I used vinyl daily, hated the whole burden of caring for it; and against CDs, I really found them wanting.
Too bad the medium got degraded with idiots who used dynamic compression, but inherently CDs and lossless digital audio in general is way much better. I never understood the vinyl resurgence, until some people explained it as being something more performative and also a way to get better artwork and physical mementos of the music. Understandable, but I still feel it's weird.
For me, it's the expense and the inconvenience... as the meme goes. But anyway - I just like it; when I put on a record it's like "I'm doing this now and nothing else". Sitting on the couch and listening to Dark Side with a glass of wine. Remembering when my dad used to play records and I wasn't allowed to touch it because the stylus was expensive and fragile. It's a vibe, as the kids say.
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.
PSA: https://dr.loudness-war.info/ is a great place to look for info on dynamic range of releases, and also, a great place to find new music with excellent dynamic range.
Good site, but it has some frustrating limitations that make it vastly less useful, specifically regarding the phenomenon in the article. The search UI doesn’t expose the release code (and many entries don’t even include it), so when it says “vinyl” you have no idea which of the possibly dozens of releases it refers to, some of which can be awful, like the article points out.
I’m willing to help fix this, but the source code is not public, and when I emailed the author I got no response.
PSA 2: the formula used here can easily be gamed via inaudible phase alteration and can't be used to compare CD and LP. Ears are still much better until a correctly designed metric arrives.
There are usefull software components (=extensions) for the foobar2000 music player (sadly Windows only player) that can analyze the dynamic range and loudness according to EBU standards.
foo_dr_meter: A simple Dynamic Range meter based on DR estimation formula published by https://dr.loudness-war.info/
ReplayGain is part of the core components of foobar2000, so automatically adjusting the volume depending on the loudness of the trakc or entire album is pretty much a default feature of this player. The latter two components, especially the latter one give valuable insights into the loudness and mastering quality of a recording. True Peak can calculate the Peak-to-Integrated Loudness of a recording for example the headroom between loudest part and the maximum possible loudness of the format, or it tells you the loudness range in LUFS meaning how squished or wide the dynamic range of a track is. Really nifty if you have a huge music collection and need numbers to quickly compare releases.
Yeah, I know a lot of indie artists. Most of that vinyl is produced straight off the 44.1/16 digital master. If you think it's analog (or in many cases even properly mastered at all), you're fooling yourself.
The "loudness war" issue is not inherent to digital sources. Nor is it something you need to "master the record out of". It's sufficient to not break it in the first place.
The issue is that vinyl mastering is a special case and different from digital mastering. You have to consider extra things like the width of the grooves, they can vary depending on the runtime of a side, this affects low frequencies as grooves might cut into each other and you'll get skips. And high frequencies degrade the closer you get towards the center of the record. I just think the people who can do this craft are simply retiring or dying out. This affects major label and indie artists alike.
This is mostly the result of a lot of vinyl factories having shut down due to vinyl becoming mostly irrelevant after the release of more convenient formats like the CD. At least irrelevant enough to make factories unsustainable. Most modern vinyls have extremely bad quality, I'd even go as far and say almost all freshly produced vinyls. Source: I've worked in a high end luxury HiFi store for years prior to getting into tech, selling turn tables, tube amps, speakers and basically whatever you can think off in that space.
I thought the loudness war was over? This was a hot topic for many years in the music production community. Sad to see it still persists. Especially since the answer to any loudness problem is to simply for the user to turn up the volume.
The loudness war in the strict "we must compress and slam everything as much as possible to make our stuff sound good on the radio" sense is over thanks to Spotify et al doing loudness normalization, but there's still an open question of "how much compression does sound good?" which is extremely subjective. A lot of modern music is louder than peak loudness war stuff just because the creators want their music to be slammed to shit. I listen to/make aggressive bass music and -5, -4, -3 LUFS are common. (By comparison, some of the common examples of loudness war era CDs like Definitely Maybe and Californication sit between -8 and -6 LUFS.)
> Especially since the answer to any loudness problem is to simply for the user to turn up the volume.
This isn't quite true as compression addresses differences in volume. Unless you expect the listener to actively turn up the volume during the quiet parts and down during the loud parts of your song, or be listening in a completely quiet environment with nothing but the music so they can appreciate the dynamics--which is the way a lot of vinyl aficionados do listen to music.
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?
All things being equal, the compressed tracks will still sound louder even after normalisation, unfortunately. I haven't seen any sign of dynamics returning to pop music since Spotify/YouTube.
Most headphones people actually use are crap. Yes you can buy studio monitors from sony. That isn't what people are listening to. They are using airpods which sound like earpods have always sounded: crap, absent lows, terrible separation. So you compress the hell out of the audio and make it loud so you can actually hear something with those headphones.
What AirPods are you talking about? The wired AirPods that sound pretty bad have been overtaken by wireless Bluetooth AirPods for many years now. The AirPod Pro 2 sound quality is a world of difference from the wired earbud style AirPods. In fact, most of the most popular TWS Bluetooth Earbuds have fantastic sound quality. The main issue with them is that they have a V shaped tuning, with various levels of bad. However, Apple and Samsung tunings are quite decent.
All of them, compared to over ear monitors. You can't out engineer physics advantages of a larger speaker. Airpods fall short of other in ear monitors too fwiw, so they are a poor choice in class.
Physics doesn't prevent reproduction of bass in IEMs. Thanks to inverse square scaling of sound pressure with distance, putting the driver within the ear canal greatly reduces the required output level to the point where even tiny drivers can handle it. Lots of IEMs can reproduce loud, deep bass with low distortion.
You of course miss the whole-body tactile vibration effect of loud bass played on speakers, but the sound itself is there.
There is no such thing as over the ear monitoring. There good headphones like HD600. It has good mids and great highs, however the base rolls off towards 20hz. Many AirPods, include AirPod Pro 2 have better low end than what people use for monitoring, which is what, by the way? I play electric guitar, and use different types of audio equipment, and I really wouldn’t care if I use BD DT770 for tracking, despite the fact that it has absolute terribly inaccurate response curve. Just because they call it “studio” on the box, doesn’t mean that it’s the pinnacle of audio fidelity. There are many IEMs, including Bluetooth ones that are better for listening to music for music sake, as opposed to trying to hear some exaggerated spikes in 8khz.
Given that the highly vague cliche reference of your comments, this conversation is probably concluded, all the best.
To all other readers, please enjoy your IEMs and TWS but make sure they have an EQ and try to turn down the boomy base and piercing highs of some manufacturers like Bose and Sony.
Those things you can tear open and re wire yourself if you really needed. Ship of Theseus mdr7506 is possible. Meanwhile how long do those airpod batteries last before you need to pay apples pizzo for replacement you can't do yourself? Some people say only like what 2 years or so. Rich coming from the company that no longer ships chargers due to ewaste concerns.
There's still plenty of crappy headphones, as others have pointed out, but consider also listening from a phone's speaker, a cheap bluetooth speaker, with just one earbud/headphone on, etc.
Speaking of, I think the sound quality of modern-day bluetooth speakers is really good.
> I think the sound quality of modern-day bluetooth speakers is really good.
The sound quality out of the speakers of some Apple products seems borderline impossible to me. The MacBook in particular makes me feel like I missed an important DSP lecture at university.
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.
Most people aren't in a quiet environment when they listen to music these days. Compression helps significantly with this.
What would be neat would be to have a compression metadata 'guide' that would allow a compressor on-device to perform the compression, rather than baked into the audio track.
This would allow the user to tune 'severity' of compression. In a car / fancy headphones, you could sample the ambient noise level and adjust accordingly.
You are very off here. People have been playing music in their cars and in clubs for decades, and a lot of them play tracks that predate the loudness wars. If anything, people are more isolated than ever and have much better headphones and speakers than even 10 years ago.
You're conflating regular compression with the insanely over the top mastering people started doing. This goes way beyond keeping people off the volume knob. You do not need that much compression to keep your volume in a listenable range, and you certainly don't have to slam the entire master bus through a limiter. The loudness wars really was just about having a louder track than everyone else. So much so that the whole process of mastering became how to make it sound as loud as possible without sounding compressed. If it were just about keeping volume consistent, they would not do it through the master bus. There are so many interviews with mastering engineers who are frustrated with the pointless chase for volume.
Arguably, listeners have heard it so long that they've gotten used to the exaggerated compression, and they just like it now stylistically. Some of my favorite records are very loud.
Compression can definitely help with that, but so can automating the volume knob. If it were just about keeping volume consistent, they would compress different tracks differently (which they do).
They overly compress the master channel specifically to make it very loud, and there's dozens of interviews with engineers that are frustrated with it.
1. Compressed sound can be an integral (wanted) part of different genre aesthetics. I personally love dynamic mixes, but if you let your customers A/B mixes they will often chose the more compressed/louder one. If your song sounds weak after another bands song, that is an issue.
2. For reasons of health/liability there are maximum levels on headphones and mobile playback devices. That means if my mix has a high dynamic range the bulk of it may really just be too low when played back on the majority of headphones. If I mix my own music this is a bargain I can make if I mix other peoples music I would try to be a little more on the cautious side if the musicians didn't demand a highly dynamic mix.
3. Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music. 90% of people who listen to music do not listen to it actively, they just let it run in the background or are passively exposed to it. Try listening to a good dynamic recording of Beethovens fith in your car with the window rolled down. You will hear some strong phrases then inbetween nothing as it is below the ambient noise floor.
Vinyl has the benefit, that I as the mixing engineer can assume that the listener will be much more likely actively involved with the music than say in a radio mix.
And just wait until they find out that compressor/limiters came about for reasons other than shaping the dynamics of music. If you're not slammed against the wall, your AM broadcast signal isn't going far.
i didn't read that as snark. they're just saying compressors were/are used to maximize the broadcast range of a source over AM radio. without them, the broadcast range is shorter, which means fewer people hear the ads on the radio show, which means fewer dollars for the radio station producing or broadcasting the show.
Vinyl has the benefit that you can largely assume that it will NOT be listened to at all, cf. the studies showing that half of all vinyl buyers don’t even own a turntable.
Large format artwork, limited edition/numbered pressings for collectability, limited edition/numbered pressings to try and sell on for a personal profit, supporting the band by purchasing a physical piece of merchandise perhaps directly from them, being part of a trend they've seen on TikTok/Instagram, etc.
Many reasons. A lot of the same reasons people buy, say, Pokemon cards and don't play the card game.
As objets d'art. The thinking is that owning (and crucially, displaying) vinyl records marks you out as being more discerning than the rest of the herd.
> 1 … they will often chose the more compressed/louder one
I’ve always been curious - but presumably that’s true even after volume matching?
> 3 Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music
I’ve heard this is also why film and video game soundtracks are often very compressed, even when orchestral, because they have to fit in the background with dialog/sfx
> I've always been curious - but presumably that’s true even after volume matching?
Yes. Many musicians want their stuff to sound like the music of their heroes they grew up with, and that music is often compressed to a block as well. So compression isn't just about making things sound louder, it also has its own aesthetical value. Whether that is good or bad aesthetics can be argued about, but some people also like to distort their instruments which was also a thing people frowned upon in the past.
> I’ve heard this is also why film and video game soundtracks are often very compressed, even when orchestral, because they have to fit in the background with dialog/sfx
The official themes often are quite compact, but there is often also highly dynamic orchestral work used that is way less recognizable and used with more dynamics (think about te soon creating orchestral atmospheres). Cinema mixes are a thing btw. where many consumers complain about too high dynamic ranges. They complain that the dialog is low and the explosion loud. Cinemas being among the few spaces we mixing engineers have where we have a bit more control over the presumed levels, especially if we are talking about Dolby certified venues.
Ah, I hadn’t thought about the generational aspect that’s interesting. The aesthetic totally makes sense to me when the music is intended for it / designed with it in mind, which I guess quite a lot of music is.
I particularly dislike when old intentionally-dynamic music is remastered to be “modernized” into a brick, which is sort of the opposite direction.
> Cinema mixes
I didn’t know about these, that’s neat! Makes sense that the levels can’t really be the same in my living room as a theater. Is it really a whole separate mix or just some compression in mastering?
I really hope that’s not another masterings collection rabbit hole I’m about to fall down haha. I’ll look out for some Dolby certified venues in my area too
I've been to IMAX cinemas where the volume was so loud my ears physically hurt
I understand them, they want to shake you in the seat, to make it an experience (unlike watching at home), but it's ridiculous I have to consider bringing earplugs
I've been collecting physical music my whole life and there were times that I tried to get everything on CD, times I tried to get everything on vinyl, times I've tried to go fully digital, and the pattern I've fallen into now in my late 30s is buying music on whatever medium was popular when it came out.
I've now got a pretty mixed collection of records, tapes, CDs, digital music, and even a rockbox modded ipod. An added facet of fun for me when I find new music is to decide what the most thematically appropriate format to own it is.
For example I own the CD for Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay because there's a CD in the art, and it feels like a very 00s album, but for vaporwave I almost exclusively buy cassettes.
I've taken to buying SACDs when possible. The format supports higher dynamic range, but that barely matters. The mix is the bigger issue and SACD mixes are often better.
Note you need an SACD player.
And also note this only applies for playing on a proper HiFi or with good headphones at least.
In your car, etc you probably want the compressed mix.
I vaguely recall reading about a double-blind test with the DSD stream from an SACD converted to 44.1kHz 16-bit PCM.
Even without proper dithering, listeners could not tell the difference between that and the SACD[1], but could tell the difference between that and the CD version of the same album.
I read that as: SACD customers expect a better mix.
The format is only relevant in that it requires audiophile level dedication and money to use the format in the first place. Not dissimilar to vinyl before its recent boom.
I have an SACD setup, but for what I want to listen to, everything is out of print and secondary market is insane. Players can be found relatively cheaply at thrift stores (many don’t bluray and multi-CD carousels support it with digital output).
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.
The loudness and compression on Low's last couple of albums is very much deliberate, so it's surprising that the vinyl doesn't have it. Though I heard similar claims about Sleater-Kinney's The Woods, which was also intensely compressed for artistic effect.
The reason it was backed off for the vinyl master is most likely due to physical limitations of the medium. If the audio channels are too loud (wide) there is risk that the needle will jump out of the groove.
There's compression and distortion for sure on the vinyl, but when you look at the waveform on the digital it's right up to the max. It completely changes the sound.
The thing is, vinyl (and tape) typically can't reproduce waveforms like that accurately, so it's difficult to compare. You can take a hyper-compressed master, cut it to vinyl or record it to tape, then play it back in to a computer, and it'll look different and less "brickwalled".
I dunno if you’ve listened to these records in question but it’s very, very obviously for artistic effect. They’ve discussed it in interviews and stuff. Low wasn’t looking to get radio play with fractured collages of distorted noise. The “vinyl can’t reliably reproduce these waveforms” explanation someone else suggested makes the most sense.
It really does on some records, if you’re interested check out some comparisons on YouTube. Many times it’s subtle eq tweaks, granted, and that won’t much matter. But a lot of older rock and pop records for example go from being super dynamic and well produced to completely crushed with boosted bass and treble to ‘modernize’ the sound.
You can see some examples of how dynamic range (they don’t track ‘mastering’ overall) varies across releases on this site: https://dr.loudness-war.info/
Sorry, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. Many releases get mastered separately for digital and for vinyl, and one or both of them often does “change much”. Usually the brickwall limiting (among other things) on the digital master.
I'd say "rarely" instead of "often" though it depends on the genre I guess. There are also a lot of genres that can never sound as good on vinyl simply due to the lack of dynamic range/silence; mostly classical and electronic.
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.
The full dynamic range is nice if you actually want to experience it and have a system capable of reproducing it. A dedicated center channel with a few hundred watts of amplification behind it will cut through the ambient backdrop like a hot knife through butter. You can watch Transformers or MI3 at reference volume with crystal clear dialogue if you're willing to throw enough power at the problem.
I have a decent[1] system with a dedicated center channel. Everybody complains that the mix is too loud if we tune for audible dialog on anything made in the past decade or so (MI3 bluray is fine, and I suspect that Transformers would be too).
1: Powered by a Denon AVR, not separates if you want to "No true cinephile" me.
What really would solve the movie issue is there was more standardised sound across different streaming services. Every single seems to have a different volume and compression / setup.
That and having an industry standard way to crank the center channel (user setting) when downmixing to 2.1
remember when HN was saying "nobody wants big smartphones, why does the industry keep doing this? iPhone 4 size is the perfect size"
hint - the industry is doing EXACTLY what (most) consumers want. there is a big difference between what a consumer tells you they want, and what actually they pay for
This is anecdotal at best; "those guys" will be using hard data just like tech bros with ecommerce sites do, and the data does not lie.
Compression sells better than high dynamic range else they would have stopped. This is true for every "nobody likes this" statement people make on the internet about things that are commercially successful nevertheless. Big phones (as someone else mentioned), mobile games, video game movie adaptations, AI music, Marvel franchise entries, funko pops, they're all running circles around people that don't personally like it and who are in circles of like-minded people.
In electronic music we've been pressing the same DAT to vinyl and CD since the 90s. Subsequently replaced by .wav. Tracks come out of the DAW pretty loud these days, it's characteristic of the genre.
Do you think the removal of technical limitations re: the number of tracks & voices has introduced "loudness" as well in terms of more distinct sounds competing for the same sonic space?
It's crazy watching some of the producer YT videos now and they open up these projects with 105 tracks, multi-layered/multi-voice drums, etc.
They did that back in the reel to reel tape days too...it was just destructive. Songs could have tons of layers, but they had to bounce tracks down to stay within track limits for the final mix.
Queen's music is a massive pile of overdubs, especially for vocals and guitar. The Beatles also, and they were heavily into looping (physically cutting audio tape and gluing it in a loop, then re-recording it). Vocal and guitar double-tracking has also been the norm since the 50s, at least.
80s pop was also generally full of synthesizer stacks, where MIDI from one keyboard was simultaneously triggering several synths to create layers.
No, you need the original mix to remaster it yourself.
If you just amplify the whole track until its max amplitude reaches the medium's maximum, yes you could undo that.
But the loudness war aims to make the whole track even louder than that, by quietening those max peaks so they don't clip, then that gives you room to amplify the rest of the track even further. The dynamic range of the recording is permanently reduced.
people said "it's impossible to separate tracks (voice, bass, ...) after they are mixed". true in theory, but neural-networks can separate them in practice
same here, but there is no real market for somebody to bother yet
Even without clipping (which loud mixes almost invariably have), you lose resolution; for digital it should be obvious that if you start with M distinct values and remap them to N distinct values, you can't reverse it if M>N (which it will be for compression).
For analog there are similar limitations, but it's limited by other factors like noise.
"Assuming no clipping" is the biggest problem there, because the loudness wars resulted in a ton of very lossy clipping and similar artifacts. Arguably that sort of distortion became part of the expected sound, though, so just because it isn't reversible doesn't necessarily mean it is a problem.
In the open metadata world there is ReplayGain which analyzes music peaks and tries to create a negative gain to equalize the dynamic range to a standard volume at both the individual track and full album level.
Apple Music, Spotify, and others have proprietary but similar systems.
(As someone who deeply loves to shuffle an entire library, having a music player that supports ReplayGain has long been a personal requirement.)
ReplayGain is nice - but note it doesn’t ’fix the compression’. Compression and dynamic range is about loud/quiet _within_ the track. ReplayGain just turns the volume up and down for the entire track, the point being so all your tracks play back at about the same level. It saves a preset on the volume knob for you essentially.
If you remember making a playlist where one song is suddenly much louder than the last, and you’re riding the volume knob on every other song, you’ll see why this is nice!
Yeah, you run an analyzer on your library and it creates MP3 or Ogg Tags that the player. Often you can leave the rest of the file as it was originally, just the new metadata tags.
On Windows I've always liked Foobar 2000 for its strong ReplayGain support, both automating the analyzing pass and respecting the metadata in the tags once saved. On Unix I was using Banshee for playback and automating analyzing with a pair of CLI tools I've forgotten the names of, one was MP3 specific and the other Ogg/FLAC-specific, as I recall.
you can use an expander or something more advanced like Ozone 12's Unlimiter. you still lose signal when you compress even if you're not clipping so it won't be perfect
No, it's a destructive process. It's like trying to get back the original texture of wood after you've sanded it down. The best you're going to get is an approximation of what it might have been like.
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.
Is that really true? Anybody buying music today instead of streaming is somebody who takes music more seriously than most. It seems likely they're going to care more about sound quality than the streaming audience.
Is it true? No idea. It's plausible. My point was that one example of a heavily compressed track doesn't make a loudness war. I offered a plausible alternative explanation of the same facts.
It seems likely that someone buying a mass market album today would expect it to sound pretty similar across all formats.
I don't know why you've introduced this 'serious' vs. streaming thing.
What does taking music more seriously even mean here? If you seriously like listening to normalised Purple Rain on 128 kbps mp3 and also like collecting physical media, you might seriously like to buy and listen to normalised Purple Rain on your preferred (lossless, or less-lossy) format.
And who, exactly, would approve that misguided proposal?
I suspect you’re not involved in contemporary record making. Like it or not, clipping is a technique and a color that producers, mixers, and mastering engineers all choose to impart for aesthetic and technical reasons. It has it’s uses.
If your proposal were passed all that would be left for consideration would be a handful lame DSD jazz records from those hi-fi enthusiasts who are disconnected from the reality around how most records are made these days.
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.
The modern equivalent of ReplayGain, EBU R 128, is already ubiquitous in the industry. People brickwall records anyway, presumably because more people are likely to complain about being unable to hear the quiet parts in their car, or about their phone speaker not being able to play it loud enough, than about the whole thing sounding squashed.
The ideal solution would be to distribute high dynamic range audio with metadata to configure optional playback-time dynamic range compression for noisy listening environments or weak playback equipment.
This makes sense as a huge part of the people who buy vinyl don't even own a record player. Or people buy special editions with colored vinyl, who would never play these records back anyway. If the main target demographic doesn't even notice bad mastering let alone have a clue what good mastering on any record would even sound like, what's the point? Vinyl has become a fashion accessory you buy as just another fan merch item.
Because the TV wouldn't be as good a representation of the original painting as the canvas print would be. Similarly, vinyl wouldn't be as good a representation of the original sound as CDs would be.
I'm guessing you're not a musician or studio worker, or I wasn't clear.
If I am using an analog device (in my case tube amplifier) I want to listen to something that was mastered on analog equipment. If it's square wave pressed on to vinyl you might as well stream.
You should save the exaggerated euphemisms for your audiophile subreddits. "square waves pressed on to vinyl" just proves you have no clue of the physics to an HN audience.
Yep, never studied physics. Do know the difference between a sine wave and a square wave, though.
We can debate whether people can hear the difference, and mastering has as much (or more) to do with it, but I will take an AAA or AAD over an ADD all day.
Sorry, as cool as I find it from a mechanical perspective, I can never approve of vinyl.
From the perspective of an amateur DJ and dedicated dancer, vinyl never really died in the underground dance scene, whether talking about the UK dubscene or German techno.
And as much as I love and respect vinyl DJs, the medium itself is often used to make vinyl exclusive releases (looking at you UK), gatekeeping the music literally, make the runs limited and super exclusive, and obviously super expensive.
Not to mention it makes little sense, musically, to put a digitally produced track on an analog medium. Collecting old music on vinyl is one thing, getting all your new music (produced on Abelton) as vinyl is just silly to me. Again, completely understand why vinyl only DJs do it.
To me vinyl is totally contrary to the DIY culture of underground dance music, and I simply won't buy any new vinyl (not to say DJ culture is DIY, but techno culture for example really is at its core punk DIY).
I would much rather the producer just made a shirt instead of a special deluxe vinyl edition for the super fans with too much money (and the couple of vinyl only DJs that will buy it). I'd rather spend that money on more new music, that I can own as FLAC forever.
And I would REALLY like if all the old vinyls were professionally ripped and sold by their labels. Because sooner or later they WILL all disappear, which I guess if you're a collector/secretive DJ is a good thing... Really shocking that a lot of this old music can only be found in good quality on Youtube rips. Yes, better than if you were able to dig out a 30 year old record in a store.
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.
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.
CDs were most commonly played in cars on the loud highway
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.
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.
And the first CD player I saw in a car had a button to apply dynamic range compression.
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.
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.
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.
alternatively, there was such a market desire for CDs in the car that the ten disc changer in the trunk was a thing.
Right? Why didn't we think to just use Android Auto or Carplay in the 90s/2000s. We were all such idiots back then.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I'm stating an objective measurable fact not arguing about semantics or meaning, whatever that is for you.
This whole thread is about subjective perception, other than yours
That's your interpretation.
When someone claims that vinyl has less than half the DR of a CD then I think it's important to clarify how big of a difference it actually is. I would imagine HN would care about 16bits vs aprox 10bits of dynamic range.
Also covered by Tech Radar (2025) -- You need to be careful when buying new vinyl – the digital music loudness war can mean they sound worse than second-hand records: https://www.techradar.com/audio/turntables/you-need-to-be-ca...
I prefer original pressings whenever possible. It's still sometimes cheaper, but that is quickly going the other way.
I keep 3 pressings of Led Zep II out so I can demonstrate the difference to people who don’t believe that there is one. A first-week Robert Ludwig mastered version, a second-week pressing of the Ahmet Ertegun disaster, and 1977 remaster that really sounds just as good as the 1969 RL mix and is a lot cheaper. $20 for a VG+ copy compared to $1300. I am not insane so I did not spend $1300 on a used vinyl record, I found mine for $2 at Goodwill.
https://www.therevolverclub.com/blogs/the-revolver-club/the-...
> I am not insane so I did not spend $1300 on a used vinyl record, I found mine for $2 at Goodwill.
How is holding onto it instead of selling it for $1300 any less insane than buying it for $1300 in the first place?
If they don't need $1300 cash, they don't have any real reason to sell it
Even if you think in purely transactional terms like "asset currently worth $1300", what's wrong with holding onto an asset? Especially one that's likely to appreciate, not depreciate, as long as you look after it carefully.
And in the meantime, you get to enjoy owning it.
This is the psychological basis of capitalism: we enjoy owning things.
Who taught you this? And why do you think this way?
It's the thought process you learn by having some financial issues in life. You feel guilty for owning expensive things instead of selling them to buy other things.
I have the same problems with trading cards I own from a long time ago that are now expensive, I can keep them for sentimental reasons or sell them to put it towards some bill
OP has a valid question though.
If you think its insane to spend that amount of money on it (essentially: it's not worth that much to you), then you holding onto it instead of having $1300 is pretty much the exact same scenario? By holding onto it you're saying it is worth that much to you.
It sounds like believing you hunted down a 'deal' causes you to wildly change how you perceive value at an emotional level.
I would probably do the same thing. It's just funny to see expressed on HN where everybody complains that advertising and marketing are evil/scams and proclaims loudly how rational they are.
He wants the thing. He does not value the thing at 1300 dollars so he would not buy it for 1300 dollars. He found it for a lower value, he kept it because the point at the start was he wanted the thing.
On the topic of HN users, is it our collective first day on earth?
> He does not value the thing at 1300 dollars
If you decline to sell a thing for an easy 1300, doesn't that mean you value it at 1300 or more?
Technically no, because selling a thing is both a risk and a cost (of time and money).
it could simply be that you value owning the object in terms other than money. sentimental reasons, completionism tendencies, novelty, some other "non-rational"/emotional reason; any of these can have a stronger pull on the mind than $1300 to someone who doesn't immediately need the cash for survival. i have some records like this (not in that price-range but still) along with a few other collectible items (some rare handmade keycaps that were going for over $500 a piece at one point) that I refuse to part with for money because i just... like them :)
Only if you actually need the 1300 cash, or think that you won't be able to sell it in the future.
The point is it's irrational behavior. And we all do it.
It's burning $5 in gas and $20 in time to go to a store further away and save $25 on a sale item. And then proudly bragging "I'm not like those idiots who pay full price!"
OP didn't find a record...he found a $1300 arbitrage, then decided to spend the proceeds on the record by keeping it.
In other words, this is why selling stuff to consumers is a nightmare.
You have to trick them into believing they "won one over" on everybody else, via discounting and promotions, no matter if ultimately they're the ones losing by spending hours of their time jumping through hoops on a product that they legitimately value at full price.
Take me to your reader
> On the topic of HN users, is it our collective first day on earth?
The disease of financialization at work. Money is all that matters to people, everything is converted into money. It's only value is what you could get from selling it, and/or what you spent to acquire it.
Like those weird fuckers who buy $200k supercars so they can sit in a damn garage. (She said, having put 30k miles on a Corvette inside of 3 years)
10k mi/yr is a nice round "lease" number of miles. Are you sure you don't value the resale value of your car more than the joy value?
someone, above: > believing you hunted down a 'deal' causes you to wildly change how you perceive value at an emotional level.
I'm going to quote myself, paraphrased, because i forget the exact phrasing.
"All else equal, which tastes better: ice cream you've paid for; or ice cream that cost you nothing?"
edit: i didn't intend the above to be snark, even though it may read that way.
I don’t see any sign they own the original pressing which is $1300. Instead they own the 1977 remaster which apparently sounds as good as the original pressing though I don’t own the original. The 1977 remaster sells for between $5 and $50 depending on grade. I paid $3 for mine and it might be worth $25 or $30 of if I did a lot of leg work.
You’re making a lot of assumptions here in your thinking. The first one is that you can just randomly turn around and sell that record for $1300. Hitting those peaks usually only happens with in person sales or amongst collectors who know each other well. It’s incredibly expensive to get to that point and requires thousands of hours of work. For a normal person without extensive contacts, it’s still a lot of leg work for a fraction of that price. That might yield maybe $30 an hour.
Some people value their time higher than that; it’s really not that deep.
He thinks that way because it's the only correct way to think.
Try raising the value of the record and see what you think about it.
Mathematically that's absolutely true.
Emotionally, it feels different. It's fascinating to see downright angry gut reactions!
A few years ago my friend was selling his expensive camera on Kijiji. I asked him to sell it to me for slightly less as a friendly discount. He told me that's the same as just randomly one day giving me a wad of cash, so why would he do that?? I thought he's crazy and was a little bit offended. Actually maybe a fair bit offended!
It took me YEARS to realize that 1. He's absolutely completely Inarguably correct, and 2. People would find me no less crazy if I adopted same perspective.
Buy for $x, have and not sell for $x, same mathematically. But oh boy will people get instantly riled up emotionally :).
Usually you give your friends a friendly discount because it saves the hassle from advertising, packing, etc. and also your friends return the favor.
But I would never sell something expensive to a friend, period. There be dragons.
I'd be inclined to pay more for it getting it from my friend than on a second hand marketplace. It removes the chance I'm going to be scammed, or the product isn't as described, or the seller will leave me a bad review.
On the other hand, I wouldn't ask my friend to pay more if selling, so maybe a par price is fair.
You hit all the salient points.
> Buy for $x, have and not sell for $x, same mathematically. But oh boy will people get instantly riled up emotionally :).
Price and value are not the same. The logic of your friend was basically putting a price on how "special" (or not) he saw your relationship versus some rando-buyer online.
That is why people (close to you) get riled up emotionally: they're being treated in a way no different than a complete stranger.
If you ask your friend for $100 for no particular reason, just because you want $100, that's an annoying request and "no" is a reasonable response. It's not putting a price on your relationship. It's technically the same answer they'd give a stranger, but that doesn't mean you're being treated like a stranger.
(I do think a slight discount often makes sense just because a friend is probably quicker and easier to deal with. But anything more substantial turns into asking for free stuff, and yes and no are both perfectly fine answers to that.)
That's the thing. This was a $3000 camera. A 20% friends discount is 600. We've been best friends for two decades, but most days he doesn't give me $600 on cash. Don't get me wrong, we don't keep track who paid for dinner or cinema ticket or whatever. But there IS a threshold at which it really becomes a random cash gift.
Yes dealing with friends is nicer than strangers - but also when you're selling stuff, sometimes it's better to do strangers. Expectations of long term service and support are clearer and have more defined boundaries.
I guess friendship means different things to different people. I've had friends spot me plenty more than $600 and I've spent thousands on friends in return. I can't imagine having such an indifferent attitude towards someone I care about.
"Buy for $x, have and not sell for $x, same mathematically."
Sort of. People are being less irrational than it sounds if you account for transaction costs. There's a lot of stuff I might "sell" if I could point a video-game-like pointer at it and right click and hit "sell", and it just instantly disappeared and money was credited to my bank account. Perhaps even more if buying was just as easy and I didn't need to hang on to something like my drill which I don't use very often and I could trivially "rent" it from the market by buying, using it, and selling in mere minutes.
But in practice one-off selling for anything less than $100 or so is a waste of time because there are significant transaction costs for one-off events like that.
Yes, strictly true, but friendship is worth it, no? Do you spend a couple of hours with a friend and then hand each other bills for the hours? Clearly there was a[n opportunity] cost to both of you, after all. Just spending time together without charging would be like randomly handing over a wad of cash ...
>Buy for $x, have and not sell for $x, same mathematically.
They're not the same.
£20 item to buy, I have £100; buying leaves me £80. Either, I have £100; not buying/selling leaves me £100 £20 item I own, I have £100; selling leaves me £120.
In the first case maybe I can't make rent now. In the last case I have more cash, but then I need to spend money if I want entertainment/utility that the item had. In the first case I lose 25% of my cash; in the last I gain 20% (this matters when you're sharing your money across different needs).
If you're trying to make rent right now it makes a difference. In the long run it's looking at X income and comparing how much better/worse off you'd be with X-1 and X+1 income, and those two deltas are almost the same. The fluctuation in value of the object will make a bigger difference than the technicalities of buying versus selling.
The fact it sold once at that price doesn't mean there is still someone willing to buy it at that price.
And he doesn't necessarili need thos $1300
I have no idea, have not looked into the value of my record collection.
An easy end to that line of reasoning for me.
> He thinks that way because it's the only correct way to think.
I typed up something, but ended up almost antagonistic. I realize I just feel sad that for some people money is literally the single goal in their life, seemingly nothing else matters.
What are you talking about?
They didn't say anything about what decision is correct. They just said that the two decisions are equivalent.
Please note the use of the word "insane" is specifically because buildsjets said it was insane.
Why? We know the price was $1300. Doesn't mean anyone would buy it for that much. So try lowering the number and see what you think? The value is what someone is willing to pay for it.
all right let me buy one of your kidneys, after all you only need one.
The logic is a little broken for me... If he really wanted the record, and got it for $2, why would he then sell it and then not have it? Replacing it would cost at least $1300.
You're logic is why so much in this world if fucking broken. Everything is a grift, a hustle, an opportunity for profit.
People are getting angry at the math here. I'm Not the OP and have no moral judgement here, but from strict bank account balance perspective it's the same. Persuade me otherwise through addition and subtraction, not moral appeals.
1. I have 10,000 in my bank account. 2. I see a 1,300 record I like 3. I buy it 4. My bank account now has 8700 5. There's 1,300 difference if I choose to buy it or not
1. I have 10,000 in my bank account 2. I have a 1,300 record 3. If I sell it my bank account will have 11,300 4. 1,300 difference if I choose to sell it or not
No "end of the world, this is what's wrong with everybody" gross hyperboles please, I don't care one iota about whether anybody buys or sells expensive records, I don't make any moral judgement whatsoever and would appreciate people in turn not making extreme assumptions about what I think about expensive records. But economically, buying an expensive item or selling expensive item is the same - Prove it wrong with numbers not appeals to emotion please.
> Prove it wrong with numbers not appeals to emotion please
But my point is that I don't care about the numbers. If fact my complaint was that it was made into a financial decision, just because the record happens to be worth $1300.
If it was a $10 record, bought used at $2, then few would argue that you should sell it and make $8. My argument is that it doesn't matter if you could make $8 or $1298, not if you enjoy the record and wish keep it. It's the defaulting to "You could make money" in so many of aspects of life that's starting to annoy me.
It's fine if you want to own and use an expensive thing.
The argument is not "you could make money", the argument is that if you got the expensive thing for free and choose not to sell then you're roughly as "insane" as the person that paid full price. Go ahead and splurge but try not to be a hypocrite about it. It's not lmm that was passing judgement, it was the person that owns the record passing judgement.
The thread started with calling those who buy a record at 1300, and I quote, insane. Argument was made that keeping a 1300 record is equally insane or not. That is the discussion here. It started about whether 1300 was sane or not. It was not turned into that discussion by people who hussle.
It is a massive massive massive privilege of us here to even ponder keeping a record we bought for 2 which could be sold for 1300. For a lot of other population this would be not even an argument.
Again, I don't actually care, but I do believe that mathematically, if one starts with assumption / claim that buying a 1300 record is insane, not selling it is equally insane (or not;). Crux of my argument is that two sides of that equation are equal, not whether we should consider that equation or not. I find it dishonest to make one side of the claim, but go all "modern culture is all about hussle!" When pointing the equivalence of the other side of the claim.
You are assuming symmetries where there are none. I want a thing, discover it's readily available for $1300, that seems insane, so I don't buy it. By chance I acquire the thing from a source that was unaware of its fair market value for $2, amazing deal. I have the thing without having to pay an insane price, I am happy. Now here comes an insane person who wants it enough to offer me $1300. Both parties must benefit from an exchange for there to be a transaction, but the benefit is always subjective to them, depends on public and private information, there's no symmetry in buying/selling, and the equations have inequalities rather than equal signs. Now if the offer is sufficiently higher than $1300, or I know I can find the thing again for sufficiently less, or I find myself in need of the $1298 unrealized gain for other things, then sure, it becomes insane to not sell, but absent such factors refusing a fair market offer at a price you wouldn't ever entertain paying yourself is not insane. Additionally, prices aren't static, platonic things. If someone is insane enough to offer $1300, perhaps they are insane enough to offer $2600 in a year, I will be enjoying the thing in the meantime.
This calculation is faulty because neglects all of the intangible value.
The reason anyone buys anything other than the minimum clothing, food, and shelter for mere survival is because of intangible value.
Any time you see someone who is not opting to optimize tangible value, it is likely that you are simply failing to observe some intangible value.
> Prove it wrong with numbers not appeals to emotion please.
This is a false dichotomy. Intangible value is not some fallacious appeal to emotion -- it is a real thing that economists overwhelmingly agree exists, but also recognize is difficult to put a number on.
Turns out HN users have the Endowment Effect…
friction and transaction costs exists in our world which are absolutely factors that would delineate the economic utility of purchasing a new luxury item from selling an already owned luxury item.
Spend $2. Receive album worth $1000. Make $300 an hour at job. Have no immediate use case for $1000 in cash. Have somewhat immediate want for music on that album.
Time to sell album with high quality images/ description, deal with questions from discerning buyers (tire-kickers), post the album: 4 hours
Opportunity cost- $1,200 Sale value - $1000 Replacement album cost - $20
Deciding to sell would put this hypothetical guy down $220 vs just listening to his cool, potential appreciating album and working for the same amount of time.
I don't think it's useful to account for time spent outside of work by the same hourly income as a way to measure how much something costs. By that logic, spending an hour listening would also "cost" $300.
I prefer to buy original releases of CDs second hand on Discogs. I then digitize them with Exact Audio Copy.
I never bought into the recent vinyl hype. Though I really like the beautiful design of many new vinyl releases, I don't think they are for being played. But I used to buy new and used vinyl as a teenager to actually listen to them, and occasionally I still buy used vinyl. Vinyl records from the flea market were as cheap as 1€, so that was an efficient way to grow my music collection before file sharing was a thing.
But now I prefer CDs because what really interests me is the music itself and I simply prefer the version with the best mastering. That's often CD releases from the early 1980s to mid 1990s.
And yes, I still buy music because I don't trust music streaming to be around forever. At least I think there is a real chance CDs will outlast individual services for sure. And in case the internet gets shut down because of war, at least I still have music as long as I have power.
> I never bought into the recent vinyl hype.
This. I'm 55. My teenage years were in the 1980s, where CDs started to appear but vinyl was still mainstream. I remember Dad having a significant vinyl library and I also got my own collection.
But I hated caring for that thing. The medium is finicky, prone to scratches and whatnot, and CDs had more length and also more range and better sound. So as soon as I was able to get CDs, I got rid of my vinyl collection faster than one does it with a hot potato in their hands. I used vinyl daily, hated the whole burden of caring for it; and against CDs, I really found them wanting.
Too bad the medium got degraded with idiots who used dynamic compression, but inherently CDs and lossless digital audio in general is way much better. I never understood the vinyl resurgence, until some people explained it as being something more performative and also a way to get better artwork and physical mementos of the music. Understandable, but I still feel it's weird.
>I never bought into the recent vinyl hype.
For me, it's the expense and the inconvenience... as the meme goes. But anyway - I just like it; when I put on a record it's like "I'm doing this now and nothing else". Sitting on the couch and listening to Dark Side with a glass of wine. Remembering when my dad used to play records and I wasn't allowed to touch it because the stylus was expensive and fragile. It's a vibe, as the kids say.
Tech radar article links to the article mentioned by this post.
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.
Exactly! Jeffrey Martin https://jeffreymartinportland.bandcamp.com/album/alive-july-... double LP on vinyl is a pleasure.
PSA: https://dr.loudness-war.info/ is a great place to look for info on dynamic range of releases, and also, a great place to find new music with excellent dynamic range.
Good site, but it has some frustrating limitations that make it vastly less useful, specifically regarding the phenomenon in the article. The search UI doesn’t expose the release code (and many entries don’t even include it), so when it says “vinyl” you have no idea which of the possibly dozens of releases it refers to, some of which can be awful, like the article points out.
I’m willing to help fix this, but the source code is not public, and when I emailed the author I got no response.
PSA 2: the formula used here can easily be gamed via inaudible phase alteration and can't be used to compare CD and LP. Ears are still much better until a correctly designed metric arrives.
Would engineers purposefully game the metric, though?
There are usefull software components (=extensions) for the foobar2000 music player (sadly Windows only player) that can analyze the dynamic range and loudness according to EBU standards.
foo_dr_meter: A simple Dynamic Range meter based on DR estimation formula published by https://dr.loudness-war.info/
foo_truepeak: ITU-R BS.1770-5 compliant True Peak scanner.
ReplayGain is part of the core components of foobar2000, so automatically adjusting the volume depending on the loudness of the trakc or entire album is pretty much a default feature of this player. The latter two components, especially the latter one give valuable insights into the loudness and mastering quality of a recording. True Peak can calculate the Peak-to-Integrated Loudness of a recording for example the headroom between loudest part and the maximum possible loudness of the format, or it tells you the loudness range in LUFS meaning how squished or wide the dynamic range of a track is. Really nifty if you have a huge music collection and need numbers to quickly compare releases.
Foobar2000 is not Windows only. https://www.foobar2000.org/
Yeah, I know a lot of indie artists. Most of that vinyl is produced straight off the 44.1/16 digital master. If you think it's analog (or in many cases even properly mastered at all), you're fooling yourself.
The "loudness war" issue is not inherent to digital sources. Nor is it something you need to "master the record out of". It's sufficient to not break it in the first place.
>44.1/16 digital
This is already way beyond what vinyl is able to reproduce. The best case is roughly 12-bits PCM equivalent. Literally not an issue in the slightest.
That's not true anymore. I've heard about complains about badly compressed vinyl releases by indie artists. Just a few days ago I came across a comment on discogs.com about this issue: https://www.discogs.com/release/37244526-April-VISTA-Traditi...
The issue is that vinyl mastering is a special case and different from digital mastering. You have to consider extra things like the width of the grooves, they can vary depending on the runtime of a side, this affects low frequencies as grooves might cut into each other and you'll get skips. And high frequencies degrade the closer you get towards the center of the record. I just think the people who can do this craft are simply retiring or dying out. This affects major label and indie artists alike.
This is mostly the result of a lot of vinyl factories having shut down due to vinyl becoming mostly irrelevant after the release of more convenient formats like the CD. At least irrelevant enough to make factories unsustainable. Most modern vinyls have extremely bad quality, I'd even go as far and say almost all freshly produced vinyls. Source: I've worked in a high end luxury HiFi store for years prior to getting into tech, selling turn tables, tube amps, speakers and basically whatever you can think off in that space.
I thought the loudness war was over? This was a hot topic for many years in the music production community. Sad to see it still persists. Especially since the answer to any loudness problem is to simply for the user to turn up the volume.
The loudness war in the strict "we must compress and slam everything as much as possible to make our stuff sound good on the radio" sense is over thanks to Spotify et al doing loudness normalization, but there's still an open question of "how much compression does sound good?" which is extremely subjective. A lot of modern music is louder than peak loudness war stuff just because the creators want their music to be slammed to shit. I listen to/make aggressive bass music and -5, -4, -3 LUFS are common. (By comparison, some of the common examples of loudness war era CDs like Definitely Maybe and Californication sit between -8 and -6 LUFS.)
> Especially since the answer to any loudness problem is to simply for the user to turn up the volume.
This isn't quite true as compression addresses differences in volume. Unless you expect the listener to actively turn up the volume during the quiet parts and down during the loud parts of your song, or be listening in a completely quiet environment with nothing but the music so they can appreciate the dynamics--which is the way a lot of vinyl aficionados do listen to music.
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?
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.
I don't know where you're getting this. For rock/pop music, it's as bad as it's ever been.
Yep many current pop songs are commonly mastered at around -8 LUFS even peaking at -5 LUFS which is quite loud.
All things being equal, the compressed tracks will still sound louder even after normalisation, unfortunately. I haven't seen any sign of dynamics returning to pop music since Spotify/YouTube.
Most headphones people actually use are crap. Yes you can buy studio monitors from sony. That isn't what people are listening to. They are using airpods which sound like earpods have always sounded: crap, absent lows, terrible separation. So you compress the hell out of the audio and make it loud so you can actually hear something with those headphones.
What AirPods are you talking about? The wired AirPods that sound pretty bad have been overtaken by wireless Bluetooth AirPods for many years now. The AirPod Pro 2 sound quality is a world of difference from the wired earbud style AirPods. In fact, most of the most popular TWS Bluetooth Earbuds have fantastic sound quality. The main issue with them is that they have a V shaped tuning, with various levels of bad. However, Apple and Samsung tunings are quite decent.
All of them, compared to over ear monitors. You can't out engineer physics advantages of a larger speaker. Airpods fall short of other in ear monitors too fwiw, so they are a poor choice in class.
Physics doesn't prevent reproduction of bass in IEMs. Thanks to inverse square scaling of sound pressure with distance, putting the driver within the ear canal greatly reduces the required output level to the point where even tiny drivers can handle it. Lots of IEMs can reproduce loud, deep bass with low distortion.
You of course miss the whole-body tactile vibration effect of loud bass played on speakers, but the sound itself is there.
There is no such thing as over the ear monitoring. There good headphones like HD600. It has good mids and great highs, however the base rolls off towards 20hz. Many AirPods, include AirPod Pro 2 have better low end than what people use for monitoring, which is what, by the way? I play electric guitar, and use different types of audio equipment, and I really wouldn’t care if I use BD DT770 for tracking, despite the fact that it has absolute terribly inaccurate response curve. Just because they call it “studio” on the box, doesn’t mean that it’s the pinnacle of audio fidelity. There are many IEMs, including Bluetooth ones that are better for listening to music for music sake, as opposed to trying to hear some exaggerated spikes in 8khz.
Given that the highly vague cliche reference of your comments, this conversation is probably concluded, all the best.
To all other readers, please enjoy your IEMs and TWS but make sure they have an EQ and try to turn down the boomy base and piercing highs of some manufacturers like Bose and Sony.
AirPods Pro sound good but most regular people use shitty wired headphones.
And you can buy replacement ear pads - breathing new life in to $150 Sony Studio Monitor phones I bought 30 years ago...
Those things you can tear open and re wire yourself if you really needed. Ship of Theseus mdr7506 is possible. Meanwhile how long do those airpod batteries last before you need to pay apples pizzo for replacement you can't do yourself? Some people say only like what 2 years or so. Rich coming from the company that no longer ships chargers due to ewaste concerns.
This is an absurd comment. Maybe you are just too young and ignorant to know what the average gear use to sound like.
People consistently perceive louder music as better quality. That's why volume matching is critical in any audio equipment testing.
There's still plenty of crappy headphones, as others have pointed out, but consider also listening from a phone's speaker, a cheap bluetooth speaker, with just one earbud/headphone on, etc.
Speaking of, I think the sound quality of modern-day bluetooth speakers is really good.
> I think the sound quality of modern-day bluetooth speakers is really good.
The sound quality out of the speakers of some Apple products seems borderline impossible to me. The MacBook in particular makes me feel like I missed an important DSP lecture at university.
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
Yep.
Most people aren't in a quiet environment when they listen to music these days. Compression helps significantly with this.
What would be neat would be to have a compression metadata 'guide' that would allow a compressor on-device to perform the compression, rather than baked into the audio track.
This would allow the user to tune 'severity' of compression. In a car / fancy headphones, you could sample the ambient noise level and adjust accordingly.
Or just have the default to be some level of acceptable compression turned on and then an advanced mode to turn it off (or tune it)
You are very off here. People have been playing music in their cars and in clubs for decades, and a lot of them play tracks that predate the loudness wars. If anything, people are more isolated than ever and have much better headphones and speakers than even 10 years ago.
You're conflating regular compression with the insanely over the top mastering people started doing. This goes way beyond keeping people off the volume knob. You do not need that much compression to keep your volume in a listenable range, and you certainly don't have to slam the entire master bus through a limiter. The loudness wars really was just about having a louder track than everyone else. So much so that the whole process of mastering became how to make it sound as loud as possible without sounding compressed. If it were just about keeping volume consistent, they would not do it through the master bus. There are so many interviews with mastering engineers who are frustrated with the pointless chase for volume.
Arguably, listeners have heard it so long that they've gotten used to the exaggerated compression, and they just like it now stylistically. Some of my favorite records are very loud.
> how to make it sound as loud as possible without sounding compressed.
.. which is ironic, because the end result usually sounded terrible. You know, overly compressed.
> Most people listen to music in their car.
Most people don't have cars
In the US, they do.
Most people aren't in the US.
Compression can definitely help with that, but so can automating the volume knob. If it were just about keeping volume consistent, they would compress different tracks differently (which they do).
They overly compress the master channel specifically to make it very loud, and there's dozens of interviews with engineers that are frustrated with it.
As a mixing engineer:
1. Compressed sound can be an integral (wanted) part of different genre aesthetics. I personally love dynamic mixes, but if you let your customers A/B mixes they will often chose the more compressed/louder one. If your song sounds weak after another bands song, that is an issue.
2. For reasons of health/liability there are maximum levels on headphones and mobile playback devices. That means if my mix has a high dynamic range the bulk of it may really just be too low when played back on the majority of headphones. If I mix my own music this is a bargain I can make if I mix other peoples music I would try to be a little more on the cautious side if the musicians didn't demand a highly dynamic mix.
3. Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music. 90% of people who listen to music do not listen to it actively, they just let it run in the background or are passively exposed to it. Try listening to a good dynamic recording of Beethovens fith in your car with the window rolled down. You will hear some strong phrases then inbetween nothing as it is below the ambient noise floor.
Vinyl has the benefit, that I as the mixing engineer can assume that the listener will be much more likely actively involved with the music than say in a radio mix.
And just wait until they find out that compressor/limiters came about for reasons other than shaping the dynamics of music. If you're not slammed against the wall, your AM broadcast signal isn't going far.
Why the snark? Who expects high quality audio from AM radio?
i didn't read that as snark. they're just saying compressors were/are used to maximize the broadcast range of a source over AM radio. without them, the broadcast range is shorter, which means fewer people hear the ads on the radio show, which means fewer dollars for the radio station producing or broadcasting the show.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with the mastering of physical media, and is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
Vinyl has the benefit that you can largely assume that it will NOT be listened to at all, cf. the studies showing that half of all vinyl buyers don’t even own a turntable.
Excuse my ignorance on the subject but… what? why would people buy vinyl records if not to listen to them?
Large format artwork, limited edition/numbered pressings for collectability, limited edition/numbered pressings to try and sell on for a personal profit, supporting the band by purchasing a physical piece of merchandise perhaps directly from them, being part of a trend they've seen on TikTok/Instagram, etc.
Many reasons. A lot of the same reasons people buy, say, Pokemon cards and don't play the card game.
As objets d'art. The thinking is that owning (and crucially, displaying) vinyl records marks you out as being more discerning than the rest of the herd.
> 1 … they will often chose the more compressed/louder one
I’ve always been curious - but presumably that’s true even after volume matching?
> 3 Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music
I’ve heard this is also why film and video game soundtracks are often very compressed, even when orchestral, because they have to fit in the background with dialog/sfx
> I've always been curious - but presumably that’s true even after volume matching?
Yes. Many musicians want their stuff to sound like the music of their heroes they grew up with, and that music is often compressed to a block as well. So compression isn't just about making things sound louder, it also has its own aesthetical value. Whether that is good or bad aesthetics can be argued about, but some people also like to distort their instruments which was also a thing people frowned upon in the past.
> I’ve heard this is also why film and video game soundtracks are often very compressed, even when orchestral, because they have to fit in the background with dialog/sfx
The official themes often are quite compact, but there is often also highly dynamic orchestral work used that is way less recognizable and used with more dynamics (think about te soon creating orchestral atmospheres). Cinema mixes are a thing btw. where many consumers complain about too high dynamic ranges. They complain that the dialog is low and the explosion loud. Cinemas being among the few spaces we mixing engineers have where we have a bit more control over the presumed levels, especially if we are talking about Dolby certified venues.
Ah, I hadn’t thought about the generational aspect that’s interesting. The aesthetic totally makes sense to me when the music is intended for it / designed with it in mind, which I guess quite a lot of music is.
I particularly dislike when old intentionally-dynamic music is remastered to be “modernized” into a brick, which is sort of the opposite direction.
> Cinema mixes
I didn’t know about these, that’s neat! Makes sense that the levels can’t really be the same in my living room as a theater. Is it really a whole separate mix or just some compression in mastering?
I really hope that’s not another masterings collection rabbit hole I’m about to fall down haha. I’ll look out for some Dolby certified venues in my area too
among other things, cinemas can have many more channels - 12.1 is a standard which also has speakers above you (ceiling) and bellow you
I've been to IMAX cinemas where the volume was so loud my ears physically hurt
I understand them, they want to shake you in the seat, to make it an experience (unlike watching at home), but it's ridiculous I have to consider bringing earplugs
I've been collecting physical music my whole life and there were times that I tried to get everything on CD, times I tried to get everything on vinyl, times I've tried to go fully digital, and the pattern I've fallen into now in my late 30s is buying music on whatever medium was popular when it came out.
I've now got a pretty mixed collection of records, tapes, CDs, digital music, and even a rockbox modded ipod. An added facet of fun for me when I find new music is to decide what the most thematically appropriate format to own it is.
For example I own the CD for Imaginal Disk by Magdalena Bay because there's a CD in the art, and it feels like a very 00s album, but for vaporwave I almost exclusively buy cassettes.
I like this idea, it's a bit like retro gaming with the original games/consoles/controllers instead of emulating things.
unsurprisingly I also have that as a hobby
I've taken to buying SACDs when possible. The format supports higher dynamic range, but that barely matters. The mix is the bigger issue and SACD mixes are often better. Note you need an SACD player. And also note this only applies for playing on a proper HiFi or with good headphones at least. In your car, etc you probably want the compressed mix.
I vaguely recall reading about a double-blind test with the DSD stream from an SACD converted to 44.1kHz 16-bit PCM.
Even without proper dithering, listeners could not tell the difference between that and the SACD[1], but could tell the difference between that and the CD version of the same album.
If the mix is the bigger issue, why does the media format matter?
I read that as: SACD customers expect a better mix.
The format is only relevant in that it requires audiophile level dedication and money to use the format in the first place. Not dissimilar to vinyl before its recent boom.
I have an SACD setup, but for what I want to listen to, everything is out of print and secondary market is insane. Players can be found relatively cheaply at thrift stores (many don’t bluray and multi-CD carousels support it with digital output).
The main reason vinyl often sounds better is because it is better mastered, so this is concerning.
That's just not true and vinyl doesn't sound better by any measure.
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.
The loudness and compression on Low's last couple of albums is very much deliberate, so it's surprising that the vinyl doesn't have it. Though I heard similar claims about Sleater-Kinney's The Woods, which was also intensely compressed for artistic effect.
This. The loudness is an aesthetic choice.
The reason it was backed off for the vinyl master is most likely due to physical limitations of the medium. If the audio channels are too loud (wide) there is risk that the needle will jump out of the groove.
This is exactly why vinyl is inferior to tape and digital.
Sometimes limitations can have benefits.
You mean beside all the noise it has?
It's worse for recording arbitrary waveforms, sure. It's very well suited for music, though.
There's compression and distortion for sure on the vinyl, but when you look at the waveform on the digital it's right up to the max. It completely changes the sound.
The thing is, vinyl (and tape) typically can't reproduce waveforms like that accurately, so it's difficult to compare. You can take a hyper-compressed master, cut it to vinyl or record it to tape, then play it back in to a computer, and it'll look different and less "brickwalled".
Regardless, for me the CD is actually painful to listen to even at low volumes, while the vinyl is excellent.
I mean you literally just acknowledged evidence that it WASN'T for artistic effect.
I dunno if you’ve listened to these records in question but it’s very, very obviously for artistic effect. They’ve discussed it in interviews and stuff. Low wasn’t looking to get radio play with fractured collages of distorted noise. The “vinyl can’t reliably reproduce these waveforms” explanation someone else suggested makes the most sense.
Artists usually aren't involved at the mastering stage, at that point the music is already recorded and mixed.
It’s completely true, when the vinyl has a different mastering. It can be a completely different version. It’s not because it’s vinyl
Mastering doesn't change much. They're just going to roll off the low end a bit. A separate mix is an entirely different thing though.
It really does on some records, if you’re interested check out some comparisons on YouTube. Many times it’s subtle eq tweaks, granted, and that won’t much matter. But a lot of older rock and pop records for example go from being super dynamic and well produced to completely crushed with boosted bass and treble to ‘modernize’ the sound.
You can see some examples of how dynamic range (they don’t track ‘mastering’ overall) varies across releases on this site: https://dr.loudness-war.info/
Sorry, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. Many releases get mastered separately for digital and for vinyl, and one or both of them often does “change much”. Usually the brickwall limiting (among other things) on the digital master.
I'd say "rarely" instead of "often" though it depends on the genre I guess. There are also a lot of genres that can never sound as good on vinyl simply due to the lack of dynamic range/silence; mostly classical and electronic.
> There are also a lot of genres that can never sound as good on vinyl simply due to the
inability to encode very low tones.
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.
The full dynamic range is nice if you actually want to experience it and have a system capable of reproducing it. A dedicated center channel with a few hundred watts of amplification behind it will cut through the ambient backdrop like a hot knife through butter. You can watch Transformers or MI3 at reference volume with crystal clear dialogue if you're willing to throw enough power at the problem.
I have a decent[1] system with a dedicated center channel. Everybody complains that the mix is too loud if we tune for audible dialog on anything made in the past decade or so (MI3 bluray is fine, and I suspect that Transformers would be too).
1: Powered by a Denon AVR, not separates if you want to "No true cinephile" me.
I've always set up my center channel volume using the test mode (by ear many years ago, and more recently automatically with Yamaha's YPAO).
Am I meant to then override that by increasing the center channel volume so it's louder than the other speakers?
Or raise the system volume?
What really would solve the movie issue is there was more standardised sound across different streaming services. Every single seems to have a different volume and compression / setup.
That and having an industry standard way to crank the center channel (user setting) when downmixing to 2.1
remember when HN was saying "nobody wants big smartphones, why does the industry keep doing this? iPhone 4 size is the perfect size"
hint - the industry is doing EXACTLY what (most) consumers want. there is a big difference between what a consumer tells you they want, and what actually they pay for
Anecdotally, I have gotten many compliments on my small Unihertz phones that I've owned over the years, particularly from women.
As far as revealed preference goes, those who complimented me on it all had the smallest iPhone available when purchased.
Physical media is dying, so that's a strange conclusion to draw.
> No one likes it, except for those guys.
This is anecdotal at best; "those guys" will be using hard data just like tech bros with ecommerce sites do, and the data does not lie.
Compression sells better than high dynamic range else they would have stopped. This is true for every "nobody likes this" statement people make on the internet about things that are commercially successful nevertheless. Big phones (as someone else mentioned), mobile games, video game movie adaptations, AI music, Marvel franchise entries, funko pops, they're all running circles around people that don't personally like it and who are in circles of like-minded people.
They are the same coked up idiots who did an end-run around Congress to the WIPO, to get their DMCA forced by treaty obligations back in the '90s.
In electronic music we've been pressing the same DAT to vinyl and CD since the 90s. Subsequently replaced by .wav. Tracks come out of the DAW pretty loud these days, it's characteristic of the genre.
Do you think the removal of technical limitations re: the number of tracks & voices has introduced "loudness" as well in terms of more distinct sounds competing for the same sonic space?
It's crazy watching some of the producer YT videos now and they open up these projects with 105 tracks, multi-layered/multi-voice drums, etc.
They did that back in the reel to reel tape days too...it was just destructive. Songs could have tons of layers, but they had to bounce tracks down to stay within track limits for the final mix.
Queen's music is a massive pile of overdubs, especially for vocals and guitar. The Beatles also, and they were heavily into looping (physically cutting audio tape and gluing it in a loop, then re-recording it). Vocal and guitar double-tracking has also been the norm since the 50s, at least.
80s pop was also generally full of synthesizer stacks, where MIDI from one keyboard was simultaneously triggering several synths to create layers.
Are there any known ways to undo the compression? Assuming no clipping, the process should be reversible, right?
No, you need the original mix to remaster it yourself.
If you just amplify the whole track until its max amplitude reaches the medium's maximum, yes you could undo that.
But the loudness war aims to make the whole track even louder than that, by quietening those max peaks so they don't clip, then that gives you room to amplify the rest of the track even further. The dynamic range of the recording is permanently reduced.
people said "it's impossible to separate tracks (voice, bass, ...) after they are mixed". true in theory, but neural-networks can separate them in practice
same here, but there is no real market for somebody to bother yet
> but neural-networks can separate them in practice
That's a massive stretch.
They are able separate them sort of, but they are nowhere close the original quality of the individual tracks.
Even without clipping (which loud mixes almost invariably have), you lose resolution; for digital it should be obvious that if you start with M distinct values and remap them to N distinct values, you can't reverse it if M>N (which it will be for compression).
For analog there are similar limitations, but it's limited by other factors like noise.
"Assuming no clipping" is the biggest problem there, because the loudness wars resulted in a ton of very lossy clipping and similar artifacts. Arguably that sort of distortion became part of the expected sound, though, so just because it isn't reversible doesn't necessarily mean it is a problem.
In the open metadata world there is ReplayGain which analyzes music peaks and tries to create a negative gain to equalize the dynamic range to a standard volume at both the individual track and full album level.
Apple Music, Spotify, and others have proprietary but similar systems.
(As someone who deeply loves to shuffle an entire library, having a music player that supports ReplayGain has long been a personal requirement.)
ReplayGain sounds pretty cool. Does it pre analyse your library ?
ReplayGain is nice - but note it doesn’t ’fix the compression’. Compression and dynamic range is about loud/quiet _within_ the track. ReplayGain just turns the volume up and down for the entire track, the point being so all your tracks play back at about the same level. It saves a preset on the volume knob for you essentially.
If you remember making a playlist where one song is suddenly much louder than the last, and you’re riding the volume knob on every other song, you’ll see why this is nice!
Yeah, you run an analyzer on your library and it creates MP3 or Ogg Tags that the player. Often you can leave the rest of the file as it was originally, just the new metadata tags.
On Windows I've always liked Foobar 2000 for its strong ReplayGain support, both automating the analyzing pass and respecting the metadata in the tags once saved. On Unix I was using Banshee for playback and automating analyzing with a pair of CLI tools I've forgotten the names of, one was MP3 specific and the other Ogg/FLAC-specific, as I recall.
Short answer, no not really. It won’t ever be as good as a proper uncompressed mastering
you can use an expander or something more advanced like Ozone 12's Unlimiter. you still lose signal when you compress even if you're not clipping so it won't be perfect
No, it's a destructive process. It's like trying to get back the original texture of wood after you've sanded it down. The best you're going to get is an approximation of what it might have been like.
> Here are samples from the original and remastered vinyl versions to compare the difference in sound rendering.
Where? The critical bit is missing!
Wayback Machine still has them:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260208100527/https://magicviny...
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.
>it sounds more like what buyers today expect
Is that really true? Anybody buying music today instead of streaming is somebody who takes music more seriously than most. It seems likely they're going to care more about sound quality than the streaming audience.
Is it true? No idea. It's plausible. My point was that one example of a heavily compressed track doesn't make a loudness war. I offered a plausible alternative explanation of the same facts. It seems likely that someone buying a mass market album today would expect it to sound pretty similar across all formats.
I don't know why you've introduced this 'serious' vs. streaming thing.
What does taking music more seriously even mean here? If you seriously like listening to normalised Purple Rain on 128 kbps mp3 and also like collecting physical media, you might seriously like to buy and listen to normalised Purple Rain on your preferred (lossless, or less-lossy) format.
The fix is to disqualify album of the year eligibility for anything showing evidence of severe clipping. The industry would rapidly shape itself up.
And who, exactly, would approve that misguided proposal?
I suspect you’re not involved in contemporary record making. Like it or not, clipping is a technique and a color that producers, mixers, and mastering engineers all choose to impart for aesthetic and technical reasons. It has it’s uses.
If your proposal were passed all that would be left for consideration would be a handful lame DSD jazz records from those hi-fi enthusiasts who are disconnected from the reality around how most records are made these days.
You might find it lame, but jazz has the highest share of physical media sales in the US
https://www.statista.com/chart/32863/genres-with-the-highest...
I don't know which genre they would divide the Blues into, but whenever I discover a new (to me) blues group, I really struggle to find CDs for them.
RIAA is a standards body.
I thought that due to physical limits of the media that mfgs would avoid this temptation -looks like I’m way off.
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.
The modern equivalent of ReplayGain, EBU R 128, is already ubiquitous in the industry. People brickwall records anyway, presumably because more people are likely to complain about being unable to hear the quiet parts in their car, or about their phone speaker not being able to play it loud enough, than about the whole thing sounding squashed.
The ideal solution would be to distribute high dynamic range audio with metadata to configure optional playback-time dynamic range compression for noisy listening environments or weak playback equipment.
Agreed
Or make a sound format (like video containers) that could have two separate mixes of a track.
This was literally the only reason vinyl made any sense.
Using "literally" doesn't make your comment factual; it's one reason, but also I just think they're neat.
That is, they're more collectible than CDs in my opinion. Bigger packaging for better artwork, something physical and relatively sturdy, etc.
Vinyl? Sturdy? Please.
Great website!
This makes sense as a huge part of the people who buy vinyl don't even own a record player. Or people buy special editions with colored vinyl, who would never play these records back anyway. If the main target demographic doesn't even notice bad mastering let alone have a clue what good mastering on any record would even sound like, what's the point? Vinyl has become a fashion accessory you buy as just another fan merch item.
I've been avoidant of most modern vinyl, I don't want to get a vinyl pressing of something that was digitally remastered. What's the point?
Why get a canvas print when you could put up a TV and display the picture digitally?
Because the TV wouldn't be as good a representation of the original painting as the canvas print would be. Similarly, vinyl wouldn't be as good a representation of the original sound as CDs would be.
I'm guessing you're not a musician or studio worker, or I wasn't clear.
If I am using an analog device (in my case tube amplifier) I want to listen to something that was mastered on analog equipment. If it's square wave pressed on to vinyl you might as well stream.
You should save the exaggerated euphemisms for your audiophile subreddits. "square waves pressed on to vinyl" just proves you have no clue of the physics to an HN audience.
Yep, never studied physics. Do know the difference between a sine wave and a square wave, though.
We can debate whether people can hear the difference, and mastering has as much (or more) to do with it, but I will take an AAA or AAD over an ADD all day.
There are some phenomenal sounding DDD masters from the late 80s. I believe it requires all 3 of these, which were present then:
1. Digital recording equipment had significantly improved
2. Audio engineers learned how to use the equipment
3. Heavy digital compressors weren't in use yet.
Hooboy. Where do I even start with this?
Sorry, as cool as I find it from a mechanical perspective, I can never approve of vinyl.
From the perspective of an amateur DJ and dedicated dancer, vinyl never really died in the underground dance scene, whether talking about the UK dubscene or German techno.
And as much as I love and respect vinyl DJs, the medium itself is often used to make vinyl exclusive releases (looking at you UK), gatekeeping the music literally, make the runs limited and super exclusive, and obviously super expensive.
Not to mention it makes little sense, musically, to put a digitally produced track on an analog medium. Collecting old music on vinyl is one thing, getting all your new music (produced on Abelton) as vinyl is just silly to me. Again, completely understand why vinyl only DJs do it.
To me vinyl is totally contrary to the DIY culture of underground dance music, and I simply won't buy any new vinyl (not to say DJ culture is DIY, but techno culture for example really is at its core punk DIY).
I would much rather the producer just made a shirt instead of a special deluxe vinyl edition for the super fans with too much money (and the couple of vinyl only DJs that will buy it). I'd rather spend that money on more new music, that I can own as FLAC forever.
And I would REALLY like if all the old vinyls were professionally ripped and sold by their labels. Because sooner or later they WILL all disappear, which I guess if you're a collector/secretive DJ is a good thing... Really shocking that a lot of this old music can only be found in good quality on Youtube rips. Yes, better than if you were able to dig out a 30 year old record in a store.