New Vinyl and Compression, NOT a vinyl vs digital thread Options

[indybrett]

In general... would vinyl versions of recently mastered audio also suffer from over compression? I suppose the answer would change as we worked our way back in time.

I have a decent turntable that isn't being used, and was contemplating getting vinyl versions of things like Metallica's Black Album, and even more recently mastered music if the audio is less "squashed" than the CD version.

I found this thread, but it covers a lot more than the one simple aspect I'm asking about.

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....st&p=722028

Edit: grammar

This post has been edited by indybrett: Feb 10 2012, 19:56

[slks]

All the vinyl albums of newer music I have (pressings from 2003 - 2011 of music originally released during that period) seem to be pressed from the exact same mix as the CD. Certainly they don't sound like they have any less compression than the CD version. I wouldn't be surprised if they simply pass the CD audio to the cutting lathe, applying nothing more than the RIAA equalization curve.

Be aware that comparing the waveforms of CD rips to vinyl, that the audio has gone through an additional round of D/A then A/D conversion. That could make the peaks from the vinyl rip appear, visually, higher since they don't hit a digital 0 dB limit like the CDs. But the music isn't actually any more dynamic, the slightly higher peaks are just artifacts of the signal being passed through a DAC a few more times.

One of my vinyls from a lesser-known band actually seems to be mastered from an MP3 (!) as is the CD version. Spectrograms of both appear to have characteristic signs of MP3 compression, such as the 16 kHz cutoff. I didn't actually hear any artifacts, but I can post sample clips and spectrograms here for you to look at if you're interested. It seems like the band just made an MP3 mixdown in Adobe Audition (or whatever software they used) and e-mailed those MP3s to the pressing plant, saying "Press vinyls and CDs from these files."