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?
Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)
11–20 of 270 posts
Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)
#12I 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?
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.
Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)
#13The main reason vinyl often sounds better is because it is better mastered, so this is concerning.
That's just not true and vinyl doesn't sound better by any measure.
Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)
#14The main reason vinyl often sounds better is because it is better mastered, so this is concerning.
That's just not true and vinyl doesn't sound better by any measure.
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.
Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)
#15Also 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...
I prefer original pressings whenever possible. It's still sometimes cheaper, but that is quickly going the other way.
Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)
#16I 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?
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
Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought that due to physical limits of the media that mfgs would avoid this temptation -looks like I’m way off.
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.
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.
Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)
#18It'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 co…
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.
Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just not true and vinyl doesn't sound better by any measure.
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.
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.
Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)
#20I 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?
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.