this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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What is everyone's opinions on the sound quality of vinyl?
I understand the collectibility of physical media, and the novelty of owning a vinyl and the machine that plays them. The large art piece that is the case (and often the disc itself). Showing support for your favorite artists by owning physical media from them.
Those are great reasons to collect vinyl.
But a lot of my friends claim vinly is of higher audio quality than anything else, period. This is provably false, but it seems to be a common opinion.
How often have you seen this and what are your thoughts on it?
The best explanation I've seen is that music is mixed differently for CD/streaming and vinyl.
For mass market, the move has been to mix for louder bass and similar things. The idea being that it makes the music more popular. But it also makes it difficult to appreciate anything but the bass.
On vinyl, you can't max out bass like that, it won't work on the format. So they have to give it a normal mix instead, making it sound better. In theory CDs should sound better than vinyl, but because of the music production trends, it doesn't currently.
This is correct, although it's not the bass that is limited on vinyl; it's the dynamic range compression (or 'loudness') in general.
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So you have to fiddle with the volume less on vinyl?
That's the one good selling point I've heard for vinyl so far.
I like this take. it's probably also why I'm gravitating towards cassettes now, you don't need a special mix but you also can't just max the volume because magnetic media saturates and distorts quite quickly.