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.

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mrob 15 hours ago | parent [-]

>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.

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