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Comment by geekamongus | Hacker News Reader

Good! As a vinyl collector, the price has gotten way too high. Let this help drive it down.

This won't affect the price of vinyl. Most CD buyers just don't want a bunch of lawyers ruining their collection as happens on the different services from time to time. Ripping a CD to mp3s and sticking them on a thumb drive is easier than with vinyl, but vinyl has its own tactile experience.

The types of nostalgia are not the same. Which is really unfortunate since I would also like more affordable vinyl records.

The tactile experience is one thing, but if you are bothered by the heavy use of compression on CDs (the loudness wars), then vinyl might sound better to you.

Now that people aren't listening to CDs in the car, it would be amazing to see some remasters of CDs with the dynamic compression dialed back a bit.

You seem to be stating a general rule when this concerns only a very small amount of cases (not the loudness war itself, but when the vinyl uses a different and drastically better master) that's also quite dependent on genre.

And omit that a lot of music sounds a lot worse on vinyl due to its lack of dynamic range and poor LF capabilities (classical, electronic). This isn't for nothing that the first recording pressed on CD was a rendition of the Alpensinfonie.

> You seem to be stating a general rule

I was trying not to. I thought saying "it might sound better to you" would make it clear that it's a subjective matter of taste.

I meant "general" with regards to the material, not the listener.

I have myself digitized a few rare cases like Celtic Frost's Monotheist because the CD was horrid and I know pop and rock suffered much more from the phenomenon, but unless the music was released first as a vinyl then got later butchered on CD (so before '85~88), it's very rare to have a situation where the vinyl is objectively better.

One such case I encountered was Unknown Pleasures (https://world-playground-deceit.net/blog/2025/11/music-revie...) but I finally found a CD worth the change. Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode were also bands that gave me much trouble when navigating their haphazard CD master landscape.

This type of remastering (and remixing) has been happening for a while now. Lots of newer releases of classic albums of the CD era have remasters with less compression. Pretty Hate Machine, American Idiot, Absolution (Muse)…

PHM was released before the loudness war. I’ve actually read the opposite about the 2010 remaster. Significantly more compression making all the layers (one of the hallmarks of NIN) inaudible. I’ve listened to the 2010 version, but never felt anything wrong with the original. Fortunately, the original is extremely easy to find and usually very cheap, for comparison.

True, PHM was not the best example.

Vinyl is just more cumbersome to make and ship and store, there's no way the price goes down. As someone who only likes vinyl for the art size I'd almost wish CD longboxes or something similar would come back.

Most (all?) new vinyls these days were originally digital files anyways. I like the big album covers though, and the ritual of turning them over in the middle.

I like vinyl (any physical media, i still listen to new bands that only release on cassette) because it is cumbersome and purposeful.

You have to flip through a collection and make a conscious decision on what to listen to. You don’t get to just skip skip skip so you tend to pay attention and listen to the full album.

I get the convenience of streaming and love it when I’m on the go or need background music, but it is a totally different experience.

I had my album printed on vinyl a while back. We had very specific instructions on how to prepare it, but it was effectively two files, one for side A and one for side B, and we were told the padding margins for start/end to leave. All vinyl has likely passed through some digital format for the last 45 years.

We mastered specifically for vinyl as a format though, the difference between the spotify masters and the vinyl masters is quite significant.

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