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Comment by jakedata | Hacker News Reader

Often vinyl records are much more carefully mastered when compared to their CD counterparts. Many of us are survivors of the loudness wars. https://www.yoursoundmatters.com/vinyl-vs-cd-in-the-loudness...

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Ugh, this frustrates me. You are just saying that the _mix_ put on vinyl is better than the mix put on CD. That same mix put on CD would be even better due to higher fidelity of the format. Vinyl is a strictly worse format... unfortunately it's also an easier source of better mixes.

Not a vinyl purist, but the argument is that the same mix sounds different pressed into vinyl vs burned to disc because they reproduce the frequencies differently when read. You would have to engineer the CD mix differently to match the sound of the vinyl.

I mean... So you can't record high frequencies on vinyl... if you WANTED the CD to sound like vinyl you could intentionally alias the high frequencies. But why would you want to do that?

It's not really a case of them "producing different frequencies when read." It's that CDs are capable of recording and reproducing a broader range of frequencies than vinyl.

That's backwards. You mix, and then master to your format. When you master to vinyl, you inherently lose data because the needle will pop off the track if it's too loud or there's too much bass. You literally don't have to do anything like that when you master for digital. You just make it sound good and you're done.

I believe I read that when mixing for vinyl they presume higher grade speakers than those of CD owners so they optimise for the assumed audio setup of the format buyers.

Which is a shame for me since I have a entry-level-audiophile setup and just stream and have little desire in getting into vinyl.

That's false.

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