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Topic: Mastering Vinyl (Read 59019 times) previous topic - next topic
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Mastering Vinyl

This is a split of a discussion Hancoque and I had, which desperately needs to be elaborated on.

First of all, I've dumped my thoughts on the matter into the Wiki: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...Vinyl_Mastering. Please comment on it.

A couple of the points there are explicitly worth starting this topic off:
  • There is no consistent, unambiguous way to identify the provenance of a vinyl master. Most methods - but most of all, the zoomed-out waveform plot - are inaccurate in one way or another. Visual examination of clipped samples is fairly telling, but not applicable or effective in all cases. How can a vinyl master be accurately observed as being the same or different as a CD master?
  • Even if a difference exists, whether or not it is audible is another question entirely. IIRC, brickwall limiting of 3-4db, correctly applied, may not be audible. If so, Hancoque's Slayer waveforms might not mean anything, because his peaks are all within 4db of the CD peaks. What audibility thresholds exist for clipped signals?
That said, I may be eating a hearty dinner of crow tonight, as I just examined one of the records I thought was of the same master as the CD (Battles - Mirrored), and I was able to observe pretty strong differences in clipping between the vinyl and CD versions. I'll reply later with some visual examples.

 

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #1
I have to admit: You are right. The vinyl version of Slayer's Christ Illusion seems to be mastered from the CD. While taking a closer look at the waveform I found severe clipping in the CD version. After looking at the corresponding positions in the vinyl version I realized the terrible truth. Look at these two images:

CD
vinyl

You will quickly notice the similarities where the clipping occurs. Now I know why the sound is so harsh. It's some kind of crackling noise that's much more prominent on the vinyl version than the CD version. Until now I thought It would be related to my quite cheap turntable but now I know that it's the recording.

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #2
I have to admit: You are right. The vinyl version of Slayer's Christ Illusion seems to be mastered from the CD. While taking a closer look at the waveform I found severe clipping in the CD version. After looking at the corresponding positions in the vinyl version I realized the terrible truth. Look at these two images:

CD
vinyl

You will quickly notice the similarities where the clipping occurs. Now I know why the sound is so harsh. It's some kind of crackling noise that's much more prominent on the vinyl version than the CD version. Until now I thought It would be related to my quite cheap turntable but now I know that it's the recording.


Though I am surprised at how bad the LF tilt of the clipping on the vinyl actually is. I guess that's why you didn't see square wave photos from LPs back in the days.

My guess is tha both the CD and the viinyl were made for the same bad master.

FWIW, the audio department where I work does some laybacks to HDTV tapes and just this week had tracks for a film that while not as clipped as your example, did have enough clipping to get some management action from the client. It was their error,  not ours BTW.


Mastering Vinyl

Reply #3
Bump for massive schadenfreude at Gearslutz, where Dave Collins admits that the vinyl release for "Down on the Upside" was sourced from CD, and at least one other record besides, with a timeless quote of a clueless (and nameless) Stereophile reviewer.

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/mastering-f...side-vinyl.html

I've updated the wiki summarizing known information about vinyl sourced from CD masters at http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...Vinyl_Mastering.

Quote from: Dave Collins link=msg=0 date=
I once had a reviewer from Stereophile call and was raving, raving I tell you, about the sound of an LP done the same way: I sent my eq'd CD master and someone else cut the lacquer.

"The depth, the detail, the microdynamics are beyond compare, it's just more proof of the superiority of analog"
"But it was cut from a 16 bit digtial source."
"Impossible."
"I was at the session."
"Don't you tell me what I'm hearing!"
"Uh, I gotta get back to work......."

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #4
This is a split of a discussion Hancoque and I had, which desperately needs to be elaborated on.

First of all, I've dumped my thoughts on the matter into the Wiki: http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...Vinyl_Mastering. Please comment on it.

A couple of the points there are explicitly worth starting this topic off:

  • There is no consistent, unambiguous way to identify the provenance of a vinyl master. Most methods - but most of all, the zoomed-out waveform plot - are inaccurate in one way or another. Visual examination of clipped samples is fairly telling, but not applicable or effective in all cases. How can a vinyl master be accurately observed as being the same or different as a CD master?



One has to get the info from the source, the mastering engineers. You will be pretty hard pressed to find examples of CDs and LPs that are actually mastered from the same exact feed. That would be in effect be the same "mastering." The one prime deliberate example still being the James Boyk Pictures at an Exhibition" LP/CD comparison package. Steve Hoffman tells us he performs certain tweaks to each version when mastering the same title both for LP and CD and/or SACD in an attempt to get them to sound as much alike and like what he wants them to sound as possible. So he masters the two differently in an attempt to make them as similar as possible and to his ears as good as possible. There are a lot of mastering engineers that will offer up a great deal of info on how they mastered various titles. But you won't get anywhere through forensics IMO. That won't tell you what a tape they used, what deck they used to play the tape, what they did to get the propper alignment, etc. etc. There is a fair amount of general info on the mastering that went on in various facilities and on various labels throughout their histories when it comes to vinyl. That can be marginally useful.

But after all that one still has to consider the often stark differences in the sonic signatures of various vinyl playback systems. This renders results far from universal. Any results you get have to be with an asterix stating that this is with whatever specific vinyl playback equipment was used.



Mastering Vinyl

Reply #5
"There's this idea floating around that vinyl records must have intrinsically different masterings than CDs of the same material."

I am really not familiar with this myth. While most *do* have different masterings I am completely unaware of any myth that it must be so for technical reasons. Certainly one can find certain extremes inwhich one can't cut the signal to a laquer. But they tend to be extreme and rare. For the most part the same signal can be cut on laquer and mastered to CD. Who is saying otherwise?

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #6
Axon,

The wiki page says "The CD and vinyl masters might just be exactly the same: the same signal that goes on the ADC goes on the cutting head." which can't be true, since the signal cut to the LP must have the standard RIAA pre-emphasis applied. Just add "via the RIAA pre-emphasis".

(I know it's a wiki, but my account isn't verified, and I'll forget!).

Cheers,
David.

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #7
Axon,

The wiki page says "The CD and vinyl masters might just be exactly the same: the same signal that goes on the ADC goes on the cutting head." which can't be true, since the signal cut to the LP must have the standard RIAA pre-emphasis applied. Just add "via the RIAA pre-emphasis".

(I know it's a wiki, but my account isn't verified, and I'll forget!).

Cheers,
David.



It would be more accurate to say the same signal goes to the ADC and the preamp that feeds the cutting lathe.

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #8
Axon,

The wiki page says "The CD and vinyl masters might just be exactly the same: the same signal that goes on the ADC goes on the cutting head." which can't be true, since the signal cut to the LP must have the standard RIAA pre-emphasis applied. Just add "via the RIAA pre-emphasis".

(I know it's a wiki, but my account isn't verified, and I'll forget!).

Cheers,
David.



It would be more accurate to say the same signal goes to the ADC and the preamp that feeds the cutting lathe.


A quality LP would rarely if ever made that way, because you need to condition many if not most of the signals you would record on a CD to make them fit within the limited dynamic range of the LP. The dynamic range limits of the LP conditioned the entire music production business back in the day. Music was even sometimes arranged and played so that it would "fit".

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #9
Please read the page we're discussing. This description is of one of many ways of mastering vinyl. It's rare, but does happen, which is partly the subject of the page.

Cheers,
David.

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #10
Axon,

The wiki page says "The CD and vinyl masters might just be exactly the same: the same signal that goes on the ADC goes on the cutting head." which can't be true, since the signal cut to the LP must have the standard RIAA pre-emphasis applied. Just add "via the RIAA pre-emphasis".

(I know it's a wiki, but my account isn't verified, and I'll forget!).

Cheers,
David.



It would be more accurate to say the same signal goes to the ADC and the preamp that feeds the cutting lathe.


A quality LP would rarely if ever made that way, because you need to condition many if not most of the signals you would record on a CD to make them fit within the limited dynamic range of the LP. The dynamic range limits of the LP conditioned the entire music production business back in the day. Music was even sometimes arranged and played so that it would "fit".



Yes it is rare to be sure. Even when the same mastering engineer is mastering for both versions that mastering engineer generally pays attention to one version at a time. I think one would have to be of the same mind set that was behind the Boyk Pictures at an Exhibition comparison package to go through the trouble of simultanious unfettered mastering direct to both the ADC for the CD and the preamp to the cutting lathe. Not really the best time to be mult-tasking. I can't see any reason to master that way unless one is making a deliberate choice to make a comparison package like Boyk did. His is the only one I know of.

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #11
Please read the page we're discussing. This description is of one of many ways of mastering vinyl. It's rare, but does happen, which is partly the subject of the page.


I just read the wiki, and what is says does not change what I just said. 

The wiki looks to me like it was written by someone who did academic-style research heavily weighted on internet chatter, It seems to dealing with a limited set of misapprehensions. The author does not seem to have the kind of understanding that would come from a good understanding of how vinyl works and its limitations.

For example it mentions elliptic filters as an explantion for bass summing. Elliptic filters are just a kind of filters like Butterworth filters. They have steep slopes. There may have been a popular implementation of bass summing that was based on elliptic filters, but that choice was irrelevant to the basics of the process wihich was to minimize vertical modulation because vertical modulation was more distortion prone and had far more limited dynamic range.

Another example:

Under "How many different ways can a CD master differ from a vinyl master?"

"The vinyl master may be sourced from a 24-bit version of the CD master." 

If a 24 bit master exists, then the CD was almost certainly sourced from it as well.  There would rarely if ever be any difference in this regard.

Bottom line, this wiki needs so much work that it would be difficult to do it via a posting to HA because of HA's limit on blocks of quoted text.


Mastering Vinyl

Reply #12
Bottom line, this wiki needs so much work that it would be difficult to do it via a posting to HA because of HA's limit on blocks of quoted text.
I don't think that's the usual way of working on a wiki

(Though I can't remember how to get access to this one either).

Cheers,
David.


Mastering Vinyl

Reply #13
Bottom line, this wiki needs so much work that it would be difficult to do it via a posting to HA because of HA's limit on blocks of quoted text.
I don't think that's the usual way of working on a wiki

(Though I can't remember how to get access to this one either).



I guess my real point is that that particular wiki IMO does not need just some edits. It needs to be re-architected. I don't think the author has any real audio production chops.

For openers, IMO any discussion of mastering needs to start out with a discussion of well, mastering. This one dives into a current controversy about mastering that is very narrow.

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #14
"There's this idea floating around that vinyl records must have intrinsically different masterings than CDs of the same material."

I am really not familiar with this myth. While most *do* have different masterings I am completely unaware of any myth that it must be so for technical reasons. Certainly one can find certain extremes inwhich one can't cut the signal to a laquer. But they tend to be extreme and rare. For the most part the same signal can be cut on laquer and mastered to CD. Who is saying otherwise?
I think that sort of thinking is inherent with the belief that vinyl must necessarily be cut from a less hypercompressed/clipped master than was used for the CD, to avoid boogaboos like mistracking/overheating cutting head/etc - so therefore (this line of thinking goes) vinyl purchases are safer than CD purchases for the purpose of avoiding hypercompression. I think that's a very pervasive myth but I'm going to take enough time with this reply that I'd rather not go through actually digging up an example of it right now... certainly it ought to ring a bell to everybody contributing to this thread?

It would be more accurate to say the same signal goes to the ADC and the preamp that feeds the cutting lathe.

Jesus, ok ok: when I say "the same signal goes on the ADC goes on the cutting head", I meant to say "the same signal goes on the ADC goes into the inverse RIAA filter and then to the cutting head." Sorry - with these sorts of discussions, in my head, I think of the "quality" of the signal as being in some sense invariant across all linear operations, in the sense that people generally care less about linear differences between different masters than they do nonlinear differences. Obviously that's not true from any remotely formal point of view of the signal itself.

A quality LP would rarely if ever made that way, because you need to condition many if not most of the signals you would record on a CD to make them fit within the limited dynamic range of the LP. The dynamic range limits of the LP conditioned the entire music production business back in the day. Music was even sometimes arranged and played so that it would "fit".


I never said this situation was "usually" the case, only that it might be the case. My understanding of current practice, flawed though it may be, is that this is indeed almost never the case - at the very least acceleration limiting and tape delay are always present to prevent accidental cutting head blowout. But there isn't any fundamental reason why you couldn't formulate a PCM signal with a peak acceleration under required limits, formulate another PCM signal to control pitch width (if that is even necessary for the application), apply inverse RIAA digitally, and wire the DAC directly up to the cutting amplifier in passthrough mode. I have asked a mastering engineer about this possibility and he said it is definitely possible.

(I know it's a wiki, but my account isn't verified, and I'll forget!).

The wiki forum has instructions - I believe the only instruction is "PM Jan for an account".

The wiki looks to me like it was written by someone who did academic-style research heavily weighted on internet chatter, It seems to dealing with a limited set of misapprehensions. The author does not seem to have the kind of understanding that would come from a good understanding of how vinyl works and its limitations.

For example it mentions elliptic filters as an explantion for bass summing. Elliptic filters are just a kind of filters like Butterworth filters. They have steep slopes. There may have been a popular implementation of bass summing that was based on elliptic filters, but that choice was irrelevant to the basics of the process wihich was to minimize vertical modulation because vertical modulation was more distortion prone and had far more limited dynamic range.
Yes, I know what an elliptic filter is, I still have those EE textbooks (and reread them from time to time). The fact is that bass-summing filters are known as elliptic filters in vinyl mastering parlance. I don't dispute that it is confusing and archaic terminology, but I did not make it up. I can change the terminology to read "bass-summing" instead of "elliptic" if you think that is clearer.

Quote
Another example:

Under "How many different ways can a CD master differ from a vinyl master?"

"The vinyl master may be sourced from a 24-bit version of the CD master." 

If a 24 bit master exists, then the CD was almost certainly sourced from it as well.  There would rarely if ever be any difference in this regard.

Duh - but that's the right answer to the wrong question. In terms of strict generation trees or signal flows, there is a quite unambiguous difference - the vinyl mastering is sourced from the parent of the CD master, rather than the CD master itself.

I don't dispute that the audible difference ought to be pretty close to (if not precisely) negligible, but I don't believe that is pertinent to this discussion.

Quote
I guess my real point is that that particular wiki IMO does not need just some edits. It needs to be re-architected. I don't think the author has any real audio production chops.

For openers, IMO any discussion of mastering needs to start out with a discussion of well, mastering. This one dives into a current controversy about mastering that is very narrow.

Ummm.... guilty as charged Arny, I'm about as ivory tower as they come in terms of never actually producing audio in any meaninful sense, but you'll have to forgive me for writing this wiki entry to only deal with answering the questions that people actually care about on the subject, and in such a way as to appeal to the broadest possible audience - ie, leaving questions of audibility on separate pages, and focusing primarily on intrinsic qualities of the masters in question. The changes you seem to be proposing would alienate anti-TOS8 people for no good reason and go into minutiae of mastering which are not at all necessary for explaining the important topics. I don't dispute that audibility discussions need to be on the wiki in one form or another but I think that they ought to be separated from discussions about format/processing intrinsics, because so much of why people care about vinyl is due to intrinsics rather than sound quality, and there isn't necessarily anything wrong with that.

This is not an encyclopedia entry on the static topic ("Vinyl Mastering"). Perhaps that means it needs a new title, such as "Differences between vinyl and CD mastering" or whatnot.

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #15
"There's this idea floating around that vinyl records must have intrinsically different masterings than CDs of the same material."

I am really not familiar with this myth. While most *do* have different masterings I am completely unaware of any myth that it must be so for technical reasons. Certainly one can find certain extremes inwhich one can't cut the signal to a laquer. But they tend to be extreme and rare. For the most part the same signal can be cut on laquer and mastered to CD. Who is saying otherwise?
I think that sort of thinking is inherent with the belief that vinyl must necessarily be cut from a less hypercompressed/clipped master than was used for the CD, to avoid boogaboos like mistracking/overheating cutting head/etc - so therefore (this line of thinking goes) vinyl purchases are safer than CD purchases for the purpose of avoiding hypercompression. I think that's a very pervasive myth but I'm going to take enough time with this reply that I'd rather not go through actually digging up an example of it right now... certainly it ought to ring a bell to everybody contributing to this thread?

.


You "think this line of thinking is inherent...?" That is a prime ingredient for a strawman. If people are actually pushing the idea that "vinyl *must* have intrinsically different masterings than CD of the same material" Then there should be some actual evidence supporting that *this myth* is being spread by people who actually believe it. Not by folks who suspect this is the underlying line of thinking of other (kinda dumb) people.


There are sprinklings of individual facts throughout your post, it is possible to hypercompress a CD to the point that the same signal could not be cut onto vinyl. But your allusions to these particular "lines of thinking" do not ring a bell. Maybe there are a few people who have come up with such convoluted lines of reasoning and made the gross error in making some universal "rule of thumb" that mistakenly extends to all CDs even ones with no compression. But I have not seen this aleged myth anywhere but in the Wiki aticle. If it is a "very pervasive myth" as you claim we should find it spewed all over the place in audio forums, no? So once again I would like to see this pervasive myth expressed somewhere other than this thread and the wiki article by someone who actually believes it if I'm going to buy into your claims of pervasiveness.

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #16
If it is a "very pervasive myth" as you claim we should find it spewed all over the place in audio forums, no? So once again I would like to see this pervasive myth expressed somewhere other than this thread and the wiki article by someone who actually believes it if I'm going to buy into your claims of pervasiveness.

I have posted comments in the past which could be construed as supporting this myth. The gist of my argument is this:

*IF* you cut a vinyl LP from a hypercompressed master, *THEN* you will either get very little playing time per side *OR* you have to seriously limit the levels which compromises the (already woeful) S/N ratio available from vinyl.

On reflection, it occurs to me that when the source material is hypercompressed there is little need for any kind of decent S/N ratio. So perhaps turning down the levels to achieve sensible playing time isn't the big problem I had previously believed it to be.

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #17
If it is a "very pervasive myth" as you claim we should find it spewed all over the place in audio forums, no? So once again I would like to see this pervasive myth expressed somewhere other than this thread and the wiki article by someone who actually believes it if I'm going to buy into your claims of pervasiveness.

I have posted comments in the past which could be construed as supporting this myth. The gist of my argument is this:

*IF* you cut a vinyl LP from a hypercompressed master, *THEN* you will either get very little playing time per side *OR* you have to seriously limit the levels which compromises the (already woeful) S/N ratio available from vinyl.

On reflection, it occurs to me that when the source material is hypercompressed there is little need for any kind of decent S/N ratio. So perhaps turning down the levels to achieve sensible playing time isn't the big problem I had previously believed it to be.


1. The real issue is there comes a certain point with hypercompression of certain signals where the cutting head physically can't cut the laquer from the same signal without burning out.
2. While your comments are novel and interesting on a theoretical basis they  really are non issues in the world of vinyl since no one is actually doing what you are talking about there.
3. The myth on wiki states "vinyl records must have intrinsically different masterings than CDs of the same material."
There is a pretty substantial nonsequitor between your comments and the aleged myth.
4. Even if there was some irrational connection between your comments and the aleged myth it would again depend on some unstated inherent line of reasoning of others since clearly you are not pushing the aleged myth that "vinyl records must have intrinsically different masterings than CDs of the same material" based on your comments.

If the myth as stated in the Wiki article is pervasive it ought to be called out. But if it is pervasive it ought to be easly cited as described in the article in the form of claims by people who actually believe it.

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #18
Since you are looking for comments and the thread has become a bit more active I'll take on a few things.

>> How many different ways can a CD master differ from a vinyl master?
1.The CD and vinyl masters might just be exactly the same: the same signal that goes on the ADC goes on the cutting head.
2.Acceleration limiting might be used on the vinyl master.
3.Elliptic filtering (bass sums to mono) might be used on the vinyl master.
4.The vinyl master may be sourced from a 24-bit version of the CD master. (However, the high noise content of vinyl generally makes this a meaningless distinction.)
5.The vinyl master may be sourced from a higher-sampling-rate version of the CD master. (However, the demonstrated inaudibility of frequencies above 20khz makes this a meaningless distinction.)
6.The vinyl master may be EQ'd differently to account for equalization differences in the cutting head, electronics, or playback devices.
7.Finally, the vinyl master might be sourced from a master with less dynamic range compression or limiting than the CD master. This is the only distinction between a vinyl an CD master that is meaningful - in the sense that information exists on the vinyl master, in terms of reduced compression, that does not exist on the CD master. >>


this particular segment seems kinda stuck between general reasons which can be broken down even further into the most basic catagories and specific reasons which are far more numerous than 7.

As I see it the two most basic catagories of reasons why the mastering may be different can be divided into two
1. Diffferences in the signal fed to the converter and cutter preamp.
2. Differences in how any given converter or the cutting lathe that was used will handle that signal.

Differneces in the signal can stem form choice of source, equipment used for the source, and deliberate manipulation of the signal ie compression, summing bass to mono, noise reduction, eq, other signal processors etc etc.
Differences in how a given converter or cutting lathe handles the signal can depend both on the equipment itself and the signal being fed to it. One can not forget that over the span of the existance of CDs and vinyl there have been any number of changes and variations in this hardware.

If you start citing specific causes for differences you will end up with a very long article.

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #19
I think it's a waste of time to argue that this myth doesn't exist. Maybe "myth" is the wrong word, but Axon wrote the page specifically to counter claims by people that X, Y or Z vinyl release sounds better than the CD because it's cut from a less compressed master - whereas the truth was that the same "bad" mastering appeared on both.

Cheers,
David.

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #20
>> How do you know if a vinyl master is audibly superior than the CD master?
You ask the mastering engineer what he did. Other that, that, generally, you don't know. There are certainly many wrong ways to determine this, which can lead to false positives and false negatives.

Many people look at large-scale waveform plots, like those available in Audacity and Audition, and compare the waveforms across the entire piece of music. This does not work. The distortions present in vinyl - everything from subsample delays in the recording process to phase errors in the analog electronics to tracking and tracing distortion - ensure that even if the vinyl is cut with the exact same master as the CD, the peaks will be considerably higher, even during regions of gross clipping. Thus this technique is generally not acceptable, even though it is by far the most popular.
RMS loudness estimates, such as the industry standard RMS figure and ReplayGain, are ineffective because they require a reference level to compare the vinyl and CD versions against. No such reference level exists.
Experimental dynamic range estimators, such as pfpf and SparkleMeter, are useful in teasing out substantial differences in dynamic range, and may be quite useful in estimating when they become audible, rather than . pfpf, in particular, is designed to be immune to moderate levels of clipping distortion, under the expectation that clipping is either going to be inaudible or going to affect the timbral character of the music, not the dynamic range.
The one consistently accepted method of showing reduced compression is to show the individual samples in a clipped waveform against the same waveform in a different master that is not clipped. But again, this method is not foolproof: Various distortions can mask the clipping so that it is not consistently at the signal peak, yet still retains its characteristic distortion. However, clipping may not exist obviously in hypercompressed music, and even if a difference exists, it very well may not be audible. >>



This section implies some pretty bold specific assertions about what is and is not "better."

How do you really know if a vinyl master is "better" than a CD? You listen, compare and choose a preference. It really is that simple
The tricky problem is stting up an aural comparison in a way that is most fair.
Blind?
Level matched? How does one level match different masterings?
Choice of playback hardware?

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #21
I think it's a waste of time to argue that this myth doesn't exist. Maybe "myth" is the wrong word, but Axon wrote the page specifically to counter claims by people that X, Y or Z vinyl release sounds better than the CD because it's cut from a less compressed master - whereas the truth was that the same "bad" mastering appeared on both.

Cheers,
David.



But that actually has happened quite frequently. Vinyl releases of the same title have been issued without the hypercompression used on the CDs of the same titles. So why try to counter something that is actually a real world phenomenon by completely misrepresenting it and then branding it a myth?

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #22
2. While your comments are novel and interesting on a theoretical basis they  really are non issues in the world of vinyl since no one is actually doing what you are talking about there.

Not sure I understand what you're getting at. Are you saying that my comment is not relevant because in the real world nobody actually cuts vinyl LPs from the same hypercompressed master as the CD? The impression I get from what others have said is that this is precisely what seems to be going on in some cases. If that isn't what you're saying, can you try and rephrase?

Mastering Vinyl

Reply #23
But that actually has happened quite frequently. Vinyl releases of the same title have been issued without the hypercompression used on the CDs of the same titles. So why try to counter something that is actually a real world phenomenon by completely misrepresenting it and then branding it a myth?
Oh for goodness sake man!

http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?ti...ter_than_the_CD

It's like you have this irrational response - "someone might be dissing vinyl here - I must argue with it" - like a clockwork toy that gets wound up and just can't stop!

Cheers,
David.


Mastering Vinyl

Reply #24
2. While your comments are novel and interesting on a theoretical basis they  really are non issues in the world of vinyl since no one is actually doing what you are talking about there.

Not sure I understand what you're getting at. Are you saying that my comment is not relevant because in the real world nobody actually cuts vinyl LPs from the same hypercompressed master as the CD? The impression I get from what others have said is that this is precisely what seems to be going on in some cases. If that isn't what you're saying, can you try and rephrase?



Compression is not a black and white issue. I will as a matter of logic assert that when the compression is so severe that the cutting heads will burn out that *yes* there is no real world vinyl cut form such masters. Are there CDs and vinyl cut from identical masters that are already compressed first? yeah of course. It happens both ways.