
Time for vinyl to get back in its groove after pressing times - tintinnabula
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/sep/20/music-vinyl-records-new-pressing-plant-portland-oregon
======
cthalupa
Record Store Day is maddening. You have the huge name bands like Foo Fighters
clogging up the vinyl plants for months to produce their stuff in huge
quantities, and then you find out that they just used the brickwalled DR6 CD
master for the source material, killing all of the benefits of vinyl, and
leaving you with all of the downsides. The plants are obviously happy to have
extra business, but they're not making enough money to buy more presses, so as
these big name releases that actually sound worse than their digital
counterparts are taking up more and more of a finite resource and preventing
quality content from being pressed.

I have an extensive vinyl collection, but I'll be the first to tell you that
the actual physical format is vastly inferior to CD.

The only benefit is that a decent amount of vinyl releases do not have the
same mastering as the CD, due to the perception that many of the vinyl
purchasers are audiophiles and want the higher dynamic range master or are
only buying the vinyl to display it somewhere and never listen to it, and
don't care about the DR on the release. But plenty of releases are also lazily
done and are just the shitty CD masters with the RIAA curve applied and
pressed onto an LP.

The Loudness War (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war)
) needs to go away so I can go back to happily buying digital formats and stop
dealing with all of this bullshit.

~~~
brandonmenc
> The Loudness War needs to go away

according to your link, it is going away:

"Analysis suggests that the loudness trend may have peaked around 2005 and
subsequently reduced, with a pronounced increase in overall and minimum album
DR (crest factor) for albums since 2005."

This tracks with what I hear on new recordings.

~~~
cthalupa
It's gotten better, but it's still plenty prevalent, especially in rock and
all of it's various subgenres.

One of my favorite albums from 2014 has perhaps some of the absolute worst
mastering I've ever listened to.

[http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/69622](http://dr.loudness-
war.info/album/view/69622)

The dynamic range is so low you actually hear clipping on the CD version.

The same album, on vinyl?

[http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/91768](http://dr.loudness-
war.info/album/view/91768)

Now, because of the way DR is scored, a vinyl album will almost always score
higher on a DR test, but you can generally see this right away without even
listening, because everything will have a pretty uniform 3-4 DR boost. But
this one is a dedicated vinyl master, and the score increase comes from that.

(For more in depth on this specific release, the guys at AngryMetalGuy wrote
up a lengthy review/screed about the loudness war/etc
[http://www.angrymetalguy.com/fallujah-the-flesh-prevails-
pre...](http://www.angrymetalguy.com/fallujah-the-flesh-prevails-prevails-
review-of-the-dr10-master/) )

Mainstream rock is still really bad about it, and less-mainstream metal is
some of the worst.

~~~
vanderZwan
> Now, because of the way it's recorded, a vinyl album will almost always
> score higher on a DR test

Hold up, what? As far as technological potential is concerned, CDs have a far
higher dynamic range than vinyl! Just listen to classical music if you don't
believe me. The only problem is the way they are mastered.

~~~
cthalupa
What I wrote was vague - I've since corrected it.

The way DR is scored by automatic tools will give a needle drop a higher DR
than a CD version even if they have the same original master with the same DR.

I'm saying that just because an vinyl rip of the same song has a higher scored
DR doesn't automatically mean it actually has a different master with more
dynamic range.

Edit: Metal-Fi guys have a good article on it [http://www.metal-fi.com/vinyl-
doesnt-measure-up/](http://www.metal-fi.com/vinyl-doesnt-measure-up/)

~~~
vanderZwan
Ah, ok. Thanks for clearing that up.

------
acd
One thing that is still very appealing with buying on physical media is that
you really own the item. When you buy digital downloads they could become
worthless if the seller for some reason go out of business, often its DRM
protected so you cannot do what you want with your own media. License
restrictions also restrict what you may do with your digital downloads.

Vinyl is a bit like Instagram purposeful alteration of the original for artful
purposes.

~~~
DanBC
That's only true if people keep making the playing devices.

I have a bunch of minidiscs that I'll lose access to when the player dies.
(Which is fine, I still have all the content in other forms).

~~~
Almaviva
> That's only true if people keep making the playing devices.

I think that's also a lot of the charm of vinyl: the technology is
transparent, direct and simple, and a child could literally build a functional
player in two minutes.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJa6Ik6xmiU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJa6Ik6xmiU)

~~~
david-given
Erm. Not really. Not if you want to play anything other than 78s.

78s were mono, and the data was encoded via a vertical movement of the stylus.
A needle-and-paper-cup player will work fine on one of these.

Modern records are stereo, and the data is encoded as two channels, so the
needle moves in two directions; these directions are diagonal to the plane of
the record. The only real way to build a needle that will play these is via a
magnetic pickup on the other end of the needle. These are rather non-trivial
to build.

Once you've done that, there's an additional complication, which is that the
dynamic range of the vinyl isn't up to reproducing the audio signal; low notes
at high volume require large displacements and the grooves are too close
together to allow this (even if it can move fast enough, which I'm unsure
about). So you encode the audio signal in a standard way before pressing it
onto the vinyl, compressing the low frequencies and... expanding? the high
ones. The record player then undoes this encoding after reading the signal off
the disk. See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization)
for the full details.

Of course, getting a decoder is as simple as ordering the standard part and
wiring it in. But now you've got a full electronic system, and it's decidedly
non-trivial to build.

Modern vinyl has a _lot_ of subtlety and sophistication to it. If you use a
needle-and-paper-cup player on a 33, it'll make noises that sound a bit like
music, but actually playing it properly is highly non-trivial.

~~~
p1mrx
A stereo record should still work on a needle-and-cup player; the two channels
will just get munged together. The point is not that you can make a _good_
player in 2 minutes, but rather that you can make one at all.

------
pkamb
> _and the first plant in the Pacific north-west._

Strange style choice, when "Pacific Northwest" is available. Does not seem
like British English rules for cardinal directions should supersede the
region's proper noun place name.

------
kzhahou
The article title tries to put a good spin on it, but the revolution is behind
us.

------
MrJagil
We had a good discussion a few days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10225203](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10225203)

------
eikenberry
Ever since Napster physical media is no longer about distribution but has
become merchandise, like T-shirts or stickers. And CDs just aren't as nice of
a collectible as Vinyl.

------
amelius
I'm hoping we can one day have "vinyl burners" (like CD burners), so I can
make my music collection look "cool" again.

~~~
voltagex_
[http://www.instructables.com/id/3D-Printed-
Record/?ALLSTEPS](http://www.instructables.com/id/3D-Printed-Record/?ALLSTEPS)
(modal popup warning)

~~~
Loque
Still a long way to go then by looks of things (great top comment on that page
also) ~ very interesting link, thank you!

~~~
amelius
I suspect that if you print a double-sided record, you will get some
significant cross-talk between both sides of the LP :)

