CDs Vs LPs

phomchick

Most Jazz and all Classical have never joined the loudness wars.

You are either joking, or perhaps have just become accustomed to compression. And that's the problem with compression - many listeners come to expect that it represents how music is supposed to sound.

You are either joking, or perhaps have just become accustomed to compression

I am not joking. Check out any recording from SF Symphony Media, or AIX records, or Chesky Records, or ECM, or BIS, and I could go on and on and on. Almost no classical music recordings not mastered for vinyl are compressed.

I like modern classical recordings on digital media.  I do think they tend to be well recorded and mastered and have a dynamic range that is decent, compared to recordings done in the past and offered on vinyl.  But, that is not to say that they are not compressed. 

Compression is used for practical reasons, particularly with orchestral music.  There would be almost no system that could really handle the full dynamic range and most people would not like listening at whisper quiet levels for most of the music in order to have the peaks not be at an overwhelmingly high level.  I have a few CDs that were mastered without compression; they have warning labels all over the case and the CD because of the possibly damaging peaks if one played the soft parts at normal levels.  Of course, anything without compression would be unlistenable in a car, so that would be taken into account when mastering a classical CD.

@dynaquest4 and @cleeds you are glossing over the fundamental issue with going digital: it does not capture the infinite range of undulations. Rather, the process quantizes the input program material at the sampling frequency, and then stores it as a sequence of discrete samples.

What you are mistakenly thinking of, is the reverse process, taking that stored sequence of samples and generating a facsimile of the original analog program material, doing bit-sum averaging to compensate for dropouts. 

Perhaps this is the missing information you needed to see why digital is inherently flawed. 

sleepwalker: Assuming your post is scientifically accurate, I'd opine that you are addressing facets of the recording process that are well beyond the ability of the human ear to detect.  Therefore, to me, irrelevant.