I prefer original pressings whenever possible. It's still sometimes cheaper, but that is quickly going the other way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

That's just not true and vinyl doesn't sound better by any measure.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

"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.)

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

>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.

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.

I thought that due to physical limits of the media that mfgs would avoid this temptation -looks like I’m way off.

Why get a canvas print when you could put up a TV and display the picture digitally?