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Comment by RedShift1 | Hacker News Reader

If only they would master CD's properly... The loudness wars really killed the audio quality and persists to this day. That's probably one of the reasons why people associate harsh and sharp to digital audio, even though CD made before the loudness wars sound absolutely brilliant.

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It is a shame. CDs have a number of real advantages over vinyl records and dynamic range is a big one. But most pop/rock CDs take no advantage of it at all. I have some classical CDs that would never work on vinyl, though.

No, the very earliest brick-wall filtered CDs were far, far worse, and largely where the CD's poor reputation came from. The ability to oversample and downsample largely dealt with the truly grating effects of phase shift in the higher frequencies (harmonics being nowhere near in proper phase with the fundamental tones). The godawful remasters once the technical problems were overcome just added insult to injury, really.

Either way, it seems like the whole debate is kind of misplaced. Analogue and digital systems have pros and cons, but crappy mastering will make almost every single one of them irrelevant in terms of sound quality.

Personally I think vinyl often sounds better simply because it takes a higher quality of engineering to make it work at all. It's the limitations of the medium that mean you can't just compress it halfway to buggery and crank the loudness up like you can with a CD.

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