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.

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maqp 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	shmageggy 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	emsign 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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TylerE 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

	▲	exitb 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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emsign 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	sevenzero an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.