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Comment by CarVac | Hacker News Reader

I can't trust CDs or digital downloads to not be Loudness War mastered.

This is changing. You can actually thank youtube and spotify for the win here. Since they normalize volumes, there's no point to try and make things as high volume as possible. you're actually better making a fuller sounding track that uses the dynamic range.

You're right, and that's genuine good work by YouTube and spotify. I wonder, though, if that practice has had any ripple effect into recorded mediums such as cds?

Sometimes you can find a good CD version of an album by consulting: https://dr.loudness-war.info/

This is often overlooked. In many cases vinyl gives much better dynamic range than CD or WEB rips.

Many vinyl releases use the digital master.

And yet the newly released album I just bought has plenty of dynamic range on the vinyl and heavily clipped FLAC downloads.

I'm glad you like that particular album. You used the word "trust". Just pointing out that you can't always trust the audio that was cut to vinyl to not just be the same old "loudness war" master.

However, as someone else pointed out, the peak (heh) of the "loudness war" has been over for a while now.

That doesn't mean there aren't new albums (be it on vinyl or CD, or lossless digital) that are still terribly mixed and mastered.

After all, it's easier than ever to get your music to be published these days.

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