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.

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?

• asdff

  today at 6:40 PM

  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.

• esikich

  today at 6:03 PM

  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.

• entropicdrifter

  today at 6:13 PM

  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

Are there any known ways to undo the compression? Assuming no clipping, the process should be reversible, right?

• macmccann

  today at 6:50 PM

  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

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...

• soupfordummies

  today at 6:09 PM

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

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.

• bob1029

  today at 6:31 PM

  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.

The main reason vinyl often sounds better is because it is better mastered, so this is concerning.

• esikich

  today at 6:04 PM

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

  • CarVac

    today at 6:08 PM

    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.

    • wk_end

      today at 6:34 PM

      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 fix is to disqualify album of the year eligibility for anything showing evidence of severe clipping. The industry would rapidly shape itself up.

• Slow_Hand

  today at 6:46 PM

  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.

• mc32

  today at 5:40 PM

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

  • kevin_thibedeau

    today at 5:58 PM

    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.

    • mrob

      today at 6:23 PM

      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.

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.

Great website!