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

A lot less than half.

It's around 20-30db and every 10db is a factor of 10. The CD has between 100-1000x more dynamic range.

It was the move to digital that facilitated the loudness war.

In modern years it’s been fairly common for masters to vinyl to be less compressed than the CD release, for the simple reason vinyl has more limitations.

In theory, yes. In practice it depends on the "loudness".

I never bought into the recent vinyl hype. Though I really like the beautiful design of many new vinyl releases, I don't think they are for being played. But I used to buy new and used vinyl as a teenager to actually listen to them, and occasionally I still buy used vinyl. Vinyl records from the flea market were as cheap as 1€, so that was an efficient way to grow my music collection before file sharing was a thing.

But now I prefer CDs because what really interests me is the music itself and I simply prefer the version with the best mastering. That's often CD releases from the early 1980s to mid 1990s.

And yes, I still buy music because I don't trust music streaming to be around forever. At least I think there is a real chance CDs will outlast individual services for sure. And in case the internet gets shut down because of war, at least I still have music as long as I have power.

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 depending on the runtime of a side, this affects low frequencies as grooves might cut into each other and you'll get skips. And high frequencies degrade the closer you get towards the center of the record. I just think the people who can do this craft are simply retiring or dying out. This affects major label and indie artists alike.

1. Compressed sound can be an integral (wanted) part of different genre aesthetics. I personally love dynamic mixes, but if you let your customers A/B mixes they will often chose the more compressed/louder one. If your song sounds weak after another bands song, that is an issue.

2. For reasons of health/liability there are maximum levels on headphones and mobile playback devices. That means if my mix has a high dynamic range the bulk of it may really just be too low when played back on the majority of headphones. If I mix my own music this is a bargain I can make if I mix other peoples music I would try to be a little more on the cautious side if the musicians didn't demand a highly dynamic mix.

3. Compressed sound works better in noisy environments and as background music. 90% of people who listen to music do not listen to it actively, they just let it run in the background or are passively exposed to it. Try listening to a good dynamic recording of Beethovens fith in your car with the window rolled down. You will hear some strong phrases then inbetween nothing as it is below the ambient noise floor.

Vinyl has the benefit, that I as the mixing engineer can assume that the listener will be much more likely actively involved with the music than say in a radio mix.

Anyhow that's my theory

Speaking of, I think the sound quality of modern-day bluetooth speakers is really good.

> Especially since the answer to any loudness problem is to simply for the user to turn up the volume.

This isn't quite true as compression addresses differences in volume. Unless you expect the listener to actively turn up the volume during the quiet parts and down during the loud parts of your song, or be listening in a completely quiet environment with nothing but the music so they can appreciate the dynamics--which is the way a lot of vinyl aficionados do listen to music.

Even without proper dithering, listeners could not tell the difference between that and the SACD[1], but could tell the difference between that and the CD version of the same album.

hint - the industry is doing EXACTLY what (most) consumers want. there is a big difference between what a consumer tells you they want, and what actually they pay for

The change in mixing and mastering can be largely explained by people changing the way they consume it. Eg. people watch more movies on netflix than in a cinema. People used to sit in a room with a record player, now they listen in their car or headphones while doing other stuff.

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.

If you just amplify the whole track until its max amplitude reaches the medium's maximum, yes you could undo that.

But the loudness war aims to make the whole track even louder than that, by quietening those max peaks so they don't clip, then that gives you room to amplify the rest of the track even further. The dynamic range of the recording is permanently reduced.

In the open metadata world there is ReplayGain which analyzes music peaks and tries to create a negative gain to equalize the dynamic range to a standard volume at both the individual track and full album level.

Apple Music, Spotify, and others have proprietary but similar systems.

(As someone who deeply loves to shuffle an entire library, having a music player that supports ReplayGain has long been a personal requirement.)

These tools are most useful when used earlier in the process. Like when you just tracked an amazing vocal take, but the gain was too hot on one or two notes. The tools can mitigate some of the distortion artifacts to make it more usable. Applying these tools to complex material like a full mix will have some improvements, but at that stage there's less guarantee for convincing restoration of the record.

What I think non-professionals don't understand is that a record that is characterized by heavy compression is not something that happened at the very end with the mastering stage. It is an aesthetic choice that was made dozens of times along the way while recording, arranging, and mixing. Heavy compression is not necessarily a bad thing. Lots of amazing-sounding records harness it well. It's an art AND a craft. It takes audio engineers and producers years to do it well and with taste.

For analog there are similar limitations, but it's limited by other factors like noise.

It's crazy watching some of the producer YT videos now and they open up these projects with 105 tracks, multi-layered/multi-voice drums, etc.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260208100527/https://magicviny...

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.

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.

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