Hacker News Reader

Comment by snickerbockers | Hacker News Reader

No, audiophiles are absolutely real. Look at how many of them buy vinyl records of music that was produced digitally; any sampling artifacts that might hypothetically be audible would be replicated on the vinyl. As long as the master is digital there's no way a vinyl record could possibly sound better than a lossless digital recording like FLACC or CDDA.

And then there are people who buy vinyl records of video game sound-tracks, in which case it doesn't even make sense to remove sampling artifacts since those would be present in the original game.

View on HN

> As long as the master is digital there's no way a vinyl record could possibly sound better than a lossless digital recording like FLACC or CDDA

Isn't the point to actually reduce quality by using imperfect media so recording has more oldschool vibe? Kinda like all the lo-fi mixes being so popular today. At least thats what I always thought, I didn't really research that at all.

The honest ones know this. Same as using vacuum tube amplifiers, they distort the sound, but in a way that some people find pleasing.

Yes, kind of.. and I do get it. Back in the eighties I used to do long drives for work, and in the noisy car environment I found that what sounded "best" was old Rolling Stones recordings played from a low-quality cassette tape. The same songs played from a record on a hi-fi system at home in a quiet environment actually sounded worse, subjectively. Strange that. But it's all about the experience.

Led Zep might be worth a try, too.

As a vinyl enjoyer, the sound quality is absolutely not why I buy it. I also use film cameras, and image quality (meaning, definition, color accuracy, etc) is definitely not why I use it. There definitely are those that fit your description, but they are a minority.

I think where the difference comes in with vinyl is the mastering process. CD's/Digital and Vinyl usually go through two entirely different mastering processes. This will make listening to the two sound different even though the mix is the same, kind of like listening to your favorite song at home from CD, then hearing it on the radio with a more in your face sound because of brick wall limiters in the sound chain.

I am not going to debate if one is better than the other, but they will sound different just due to mastering. So it is not a direct apples to apples comparison.

I think most people buy video game vinyl just to display them, haha.

> As long as the master is digital there's no way a vinyl record could possibly sound better than a lossless digital recording

...Unless you happen to like the particular brand of distortion that every song you loved growing up happened to have.

thats not a great argument because often the master for a vinyl record is different (crucially, less hyped and compressed) to even be cuttable on vinyl. thus the final product actually can sound better in some cases (not all), not directly because of the vinyl playback but the production processes leading up to that.

Are you sure? I thought the limitations of vinyl required music to be compressed, but that was not true for digital.

Back in the day music was definitely less compressed, but I thought that was more due to different mixing philosophies.

If you like the sound of a higher noise floor and less dynamic range then vinyl might sound better to you. I’m not being facetious, some people genuinely prefer the sound of records.

Vinyl requires compression within a certain range - too little or too much is no good.

Digital allows for far higher compression - historically digital released have been compressed to hell into a "brick" with very little actual dynamic range. This is so that when they're played on radio they're going to sound louder than anything else. Vinyl doesn't allow for this same amount of compression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Modern streaming services will recompress songs to a common standard, negating all of the loudness war stuff, but I haven't looked at new releases to see if heavy compression is still common practice on the master releases but I'd assume they still do it because practices change slowly. In that case they're just throwing away bit depth for no reason.

Interesting reply, thanks.

> Modern streaming services will recompress songs to a common standard, negating all of the loudness war stuff, but I haven't looked at new releases to see if heavy compression is still common practice on the master releases but I'd assume they still do it because practices change slowly.

I assume good mastering engineers create dedicated masters for each major streaming service because of their different requirements.

There is no way a vinyl can ever sound better than digital. Different and maybe more "pleasurable" (for some), but definately not better. It's more of a built in EQ profile that stems from the physical medium itself.

This isn’t really the entire point of vinyl.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com