Is New Vinyl Exempt from Loudness Wars?

Mapman wrote,

"The Adele that I am most familiar with is the tune "Skyfall" which was the theme song for the recent James Bond movie. I know and like it from a class at the gym (balance). I only have an mp3 download from Amazon so far and its not bad, fairly listenable overall I would say. Lossless digital version is surely better."

The lossless digital version must surely be better? Surely you jest. Take a gander at Adele’s page on the dynamic range database link below. See if you can detect why someone recently posted regarding Adele’s poor showing when it comes to dynamic range.

http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Adele&album=

Cheerios

Geoff,

All I;m saying is lossless CD res format is higher resolution than lossy (the .mp3 download).

But yes format alone does not assure the content so anything is possible.

In the case of the mp3 even, Skyfall may not be the DR champ in the grand scale of things but it is a very well done recording overall I would say though certainly not perfect by audiophile standards and is a lovely listen even if not particularly an Adele fan like me. I do think she is talented though and very much enjoy some of her stuff, warts and all.

I would only add that I often later get CD versions of tracks I like that I first download as .mp3 mostly out of convenience and in every case the ripped CD version is better by a small margin. I usually keep both on my music server and when one queues up randomly I try to guess which it is and usually guess right. Hows that for a/b blind testing?

Hello, Mapman. But we’re not talking about resolution, at least on this particular thread, only dynamic range.  Myself, I don't see any correlation between dynamic range and resolution but I have heard opinions at variance with mine. As I just posted this morning even hi res downloads are not exempt from trigger happy audio engineers in terms of overly aggressive dynamic range compression. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...

Agree.  Resolution and dynamic range are two different things and not necessarily correlated.  You can have lots of bits available for both but its still the recording engineers that get to determine how or if to use them or not.

while the cutting lathes are truly magnificent machines and properly maintained stand the test of time beautifully… The format itself was not made to reproduce the kind of loud and often distorted music we have today.

Vinyl is an analogue format and sounds great. But with that come some physical limitations. Digital formats like CD and MP3 can reproduce anything where as vinyl is more unforgiving.

What Physical Vinyl Limitations ?

Well the very nature of the cutting act itself by the person and the machine (cutter). The person doing the vinyl master cut needs to be careful when cutting vinyl. Extreme signals can damage the equipment and also put grooves in the vinyl that are too big, which will prevent 20 mins of music a side. Go over 20 mins results in smaller grooves which leads to distortion and other problems like tracking.

This is incorrect.

First and most important, we should all keep in mind that **all** recording gear is designed to record whatever is thrown at it- it does not have taste of its own and would have no idea if the recording is ;music we have today' or something older. The simple fact is that vinyl easily records 'the loud and often distorted music of today' with no worries. Ask me how I know.

Here is another fact I discovered after we set up our LP mastering operation: The mastering amplifiers typically have about 10X more power than the cutterhead could ever handle. This is so its impossible to overload the electronics. The cutterhead itself, which indeed fragile by comparison, can cut undistorted grooves that no cartridge/tone arm combo could ever hope to track. So with any music that can be recorded at all the cutterhead is in no danger whatsoever, unless the mastering engineer does something stupid (again, ask me how I know...). IOW, the limit to LP dynamic range is in **playback**, not record!

The simple fact of the matter is while the LP likely falls a few (and I mean just a few) db short of the dynamic range of Redbook, in practice that dynamic range of Redbook is never exploited (the same with MP3) due to the fact that the media has expectation to be used in a car. Since LP does not have this expectation, usually it will in practice have greater dynamic range in the grooves that you will see with any commercial digital recording.

Going over 20 minutes on a side really is not a problem and you see it all the time. But that is a good side length as it can accommodate any kind of music without dynamic compression or tracking problems.