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Comment by ubertakter | Hacker News Reader

So you're saying (correctly I think) that it doesn't have anything to do with the CD itself but everything to do with how the album was engineered. CD's don't magically introduce compression, it's about the production trends in mainstream music (which suck).

I'm confident that a good producer and engineer could make an album on CD sound extremely close to an LP, likely by mastering the album similar to the way you would for an LP.

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Exactly. CDs can contain basically any audio you'd like... which is part of the cause of loudness wars, after all - you can put things on a CD that just wouldn't work on vinyl.

You can even add vinyl effects (warmness/clicks) in post-processing. I have a few songs in my library that really do sound like you're playing an LP, even though they're completely synthetic.

In the ripping community, there are some well-known albums that were mastered differently for LPs and are considered superior to their digital mastering. And so there are folks who spend $$$ on setups to play back the LP, record it, and then postprocess it to remove clicks. You end up with a digital audio file that has the better mastering. You could put that same file on a CD, after all.

Very much. Classical music often is mixed the same way as enough listeners are musicians who want the better mixes. I'm sure there are other odd (non-mainstream) music that gets good treatment as well.

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