Comment by beAbU

Comment by beAbU 10 hours ago

> It's a surprisingly common error where someone picks up an old 35mm print and assumes it is somehow canonical

Same applies for people buying modern vinyl records believing them to be more authentic than a CD or (god-forbid) online streaming.

Everything comes from a digital master, and arguably the vinyl copy adds artefacts and colour to the sound that is not part of the original recording. Additionally, the vinyl is not catching more overtones because it's analogue, there is no true analogue path in modern music any more.

vanderZwan 8 hours ago

I don't know if this is still true, but I know that in the 2000s the vinyls usually were mastered better than the CDs. There even was a website comparing CD vs vinyl releases, where the person hosting it was lamenting this fact because objectively CDs have a much higher dynamic range than vinyls, although I can't find it now. CDs were a victim of the loudness war[0].

Allegedly, for a lot of music that is old enough the best version to get (if you have the kind of hifi system that can make use of it) is an early 80s CD release, because it sits in a sweet spot of predating the loudness war where producers actually using the dynamic range of the CD.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

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jorvi 5 hours ago

The loudness wars were mostly an artifact of the 90s-2010s, because consumers were listening on horrible plasticky iPod earbuds or cheap Logitech speakers and the music had to sound good on those.
Once better monitors became more commonplace, mastering became dynamic again.
This is most clear with Metallica's Death Magnetic, which is a brickwalled monstrosity on the 2008 release but was fixed on the 2015 release[0]. And you can see this all over, where albums from the 90s had a 2000s "10-year anniversary" remaster that is heavily compressed, but then a 2010s or 2020s remaster that is dynamic again.
[0] Interestingly enough between those dates, fans extracted the non-brickwalled Guitar Hero tracks and mastered them as well as they could. Fun times :).

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Cthulhu_ 7 hours ago

I dunno about authentic but for a while (as another commenter pointed out) they didn't have the loudness maxed out and / or had better dynamic range. That said, music quality aside, vinyls have IMO better collectability value than CDs. They feel less fragile, much more space for artwork and extras, etc.

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