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Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

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Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#91

Post by Cthulhu_ »

everdrive wrote: post #7

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 co…

> No one likes it, except for those guys.

This is anecdotal at best; "those guys" will be using hard data just like tech bros with ecommerce sites do, and the data does not lie.

Compression sells better than high dynamic range else they would have stopped. This is true for every "nobody likes this" statement people make on the internet about things that are commercially successful nevertheless. Big phones (as someone else mentioned), mobile games, video game movie adaptations, AI music, Marvel franchise entries, funko pops, they're all running circles around people that don't personally like it and who are in circles of like-minded people.

Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#92

Post by Cthulhu_ »

badgersnake wrote: post #85

This was literally the only reason vinyl made any sense.

Using "literally" doesn't make your comment factual; it's one reason, but also I just think they're neat.

That is, they're more collectible than CDs in my opinion. Bigger packaging for better artwork, something physical and relatively sturdy, etc.

Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#93

Post by badgersnake »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #92
badgersnake wrote: post #85

This was literally the only reason vinyl made any sense.

Using "literally" doesn't make your comment factual; it's one reason, but also I just think they're neat. That is, they're more collectible than CDs in my opinion. Bigger packaging for better artwork, something physical and relatively sturdy, etc.

Vinyl? Sturdy? Please.

Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#94

Post by qwery »

mrob wrote: post #38
qwery wrote: post #9

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…

>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.

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.

Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#95

Post by sevenzero »

emsign wrote: post #65
larodi wrote: post #6

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.

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 de…

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.

Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#96

Post by [deleted] »

pembrook wrote: post #83
bravura wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who taught you this? And why do you think this way?

OP has a valid question though. If you think its insane to spend that amount of money on it (essentially: it's not worth that much to you ), then you holding onto it instead of having $1300 is pretty much the exact same scenario? By holding onto it you're saying it is worth that much to you. It sounds like believing you hunted down a 'deal' causes you to wildly change how you perceive value at an emotional level. I w…

[deleted]

Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#97

Post by chownie »

pembrook wrote: post #83
bravura wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who taught you this? And why do you think this way?

OP has a valid question though. If you think its insane to spend that amount of money on it (essentially: it's not worth that much to you ), then you holding onto it instead of having $1300 is pretty much the exact same scenario? By holding onto it you're saying it is worth that much to you. It sounds like believing you hunted down a 'deal' causes you to wildly change how you perceive value at an emotional level. I w…

He wants the thing. He does not value the thing at 1300 dollars so he would not buy it for 1300 dollars. He found it for a lower value, he kept it because the point at the start was he wanted the thing.

On the topic of HN users, is it our collective first day on earth?

Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#98

Post by embedding-shape »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #82
bravura wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who taught you this? And why do you think this way?

He thinks that way because it's the only correct way to think. Try raising the value of the record and see what you think about it.

> He thinks that way because it's the only correct way to think.

I typed up something, but ended up almost antagonistic. I realize I just feel sad that for some people money is literally the single goal in their life, seemingly nothing else matters.

Re: Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)

#100

Post by exitb »

TylerE wrote: post #77
larodi wrote: post #6

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.

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.

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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