this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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I think people generally have been taught to accept lower quality for convenience and even I, the guy who cared a lot about quality and spent for it, have acquiesced. I want full quality, uncompressed everything. But I stream my movies and stopped buying Blu-rays. I still buy CDs, but I’m an old man who likes album art.
Humans actually ignore certain bad attributes of music if that's what they're used to.
There has been a study a whole back and essentially, if you're old, you are much more tolerant to the typical tape noise and hissing than young people, simply because that's what you grew up with. MP3s and digital compression in general sounds really bad, though. For young people, the opposite is true, they can ignore compression artifacts, but not tape hiss.
I often wonder if this is because it’s MISSING the tape noise and record scratches. I’ve heard lots of people say that vinyl is better audio quality than CD, which is simply not true. I suspect that feeling of it being better audio quality comes from it being what you’re used to.
I think in general the reason people think vinyl sounds better actually isn't a quality judgement and is down to the different mastering vinyl typically receives. Streaming music sources are typically mastered very loud with the dynamic range reduced as a result, this is to compete with all the other tracks mastered for loudness. Loud typically subjectively sounds better when A/B comparisons are done, like when a streaming service serves up a bunch of random songs. Because vinyl has the privilege of not being shuffled with other productions and due to the physical nature of the medium it typically receives a bespoke mastering of the content. This bespoke master typically has a better dynamic range because it doesn't have to max out loudness. In my experience I prefer the vinyl mastering of an album versus the streaming mastering 90% of the time. There are some stinkers though :P
I meant (in MY comparison) specifically compared to CDs, and I would hope an album bought on CD is still mastered for that album. CDs are lossless, vinyl is only that high of quality the first time it’s played (and even then introduces noise).
Yeah, streamed versions aren’t going to be as good.
Ah, I see! Like I said though, not necessarily a quality difference but a mastering difference. It's not that the mastering isn't made for the album/songs, it's just the target medium of the masters that are different and the nature of the mediums the masters are destined for.
This obviously comes down to the specific album, but from what I understand it is common to have just two masters, one for digital (streaming/CD) and one for analog (vinyl). A huge driver of this is that you CAN take a streaming master and put it on CD but you CANNOT do the same for Vinyl, because of it's physical limitations. A streaming master on CD functions perfectly while a streaming master on vinyl has a good chance to cause the needle to jump tracks and have distortions because of the loudness the vinyl can't handle. That's why maybe only vinyl gets a special master, because the medium demands it.
Of course there is nothing stopping an audio engineer from creating that vinyl master and sending it for the CD and Vinyl!
Not trying to argue merits of either format though, I love and use both. I even stream music (gasp). I'm just an audio nerd info dumping haha
I see you and I appreciate you. 😂
Hello fellow cd buyer! There are dozens of us!
I was like that too until I realized that all media is compressed in some way. A digital recording is only ever as precise as the analog to digital converter that was used in the studio. Analog is only as precise as it's smallest distinguishable change. Eventually enough is enough and I was only wasting money.