Well to be honest, the video doesn‘t really cover anything about our point around dynamic range on vinyl vs. nowadays loudness.
I‘m not trying to corner you into any „haha gotcha!“ or anything, I was simply wondering about this specific line of reasoning you had there. You‘re talking very broadly about audio quality, which is fine, but not what I meant.
@Lauli The point is, with Loudness focused mastering a lot of dynamic range and detail is lost and because of this push it has an even more negative effect when it’s pressed onto Vinyl.
There is a different and very good youtube video out there explaining this, but I can’t find it at the moment.
Like someone else explained, when mastering for Vinyl, extra care needs to be taken into consideration to make it sound really good.
But no one cares about that anymore, since the focus is releasing on Streaming media and the Vinyl is just to cater to the current hype and pad the label’s bottom-line. They literally just use the same master for Streaming services and press that onto Vinyl!
The labels just don’t care, as everyone just buys it anyway and won’t hear the difference.
I know. Sometimes a 21st century big player has a Masters. There are quite a few from old school, though. And they sound really great.
Take it for what it’s worth, anyway.
Thats an interesting idea but the audio has been compressed by youtube because he’s made it too loud.
You can see this if you right click and go stats for nerds: Volume / Normalized 100% / 79% (content loudness 2.1dB)
You have to be at -1dB for youtube to leave the audio alone IIRC.
Personally don’t think it should really matter if it hit digital at some point before going to vinyl or tape. Just by the nature of analog recording mediums and play back impart a life to it that isn’t really found in digital music and that is what makes those mediums special and more of a “listening experience”. But also a lot of it was because of the methods used with analog recording, having to get stuff in one take, super practiced but still it was never “perfect” so just interesting oddities would end up in there and become part of the life of a song. Everyone who listens to vinyl or tape has there reason for listening to vinyl or tape, it could be a purely romantic reason like “this music was never digital” (doubt you would actually hear the difference if it was bounced to digital at high resolution at one point, and if you did it would likely because of the Analog side of a DAC imparting color to the sound) or a purely medium based reason like just liking listening to the character these mediums imprint on the sounds and how they change over time and how playback speed is not constant. I would highly recommend checking out the Ways of Hearing podcast or book (the book is really cool) and has some really interesting thoughts on digital and analog with in music and just the world in general.
There is other stuff to consider also with vinyl maybe not being closer to live as it has physical limitations. Digital can repoduce a much wider dynamic range, which will be truer to live while with vinyl or tape you are going to need to master specifically for those mediums to get the best sound.
Think about music? Luxury! Back in my day…
Yeah but his serious listening face is lossless!
This makes me sad.
Real percussion, a didgeridoo, lots of clapping and chanting and a few psychedelics. How’d you think it was done for thousands of years before Fruity Loops? 
Back then we used to reminisce uphill, both ways!
I think the artistic use of sound quality is very interesting. Certain artists and genres have qualities as a feature not a bug.
Listening to Andrew Weatherall RIP talking about formats … it’s interesting he’d often find music on vinyl then record to CD. He wants the qualities of the record (soft compression, dulled highs and lows?) but doesn’t care for lugging around all those boxes.
We were talking explicitly about psytrance, which is a well-defined electronic music subgenre: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_trance
@mynewcolour Hehe talk about it. I completely destroyed my back as a DJ 15 years ago, constantly dragging around two 40+ kg DJ bags full of Vinyl.
The rise of the Pioneer DJ CD players slowly finding their way into clubs in the 2003-2006 period, was a huge blessing for me. Since carrying around a handful of CD´s was a hell lot easier than a ton of Vinyl. So I also started transferring my most used records onto CD.
but normalisation is not compression.
normalisation is reducing/increasing the signal a uniform amount. more here;
https://productionadvice.co.uk/stats-for-nerds/
I think that is what most streaming services now do (but using loudness over time rather than peak to normalise)
I think there’s a good chance mainstream masters will already be getting a bit more dynamic or will do soon because of this - everything is in theory the same loudness on Spotify now, so actually the way to sound loud is to have dynamics.
on the other hand, ears like loud things, so maybe people will keep hounding mastering engineers to make things louder instead.
Also, I think recording music at ALL is clearly the real issue and should be stopped. Keep it REAL.
About those wire recorders: their sound quality is awful, lo fi and heavily bandlimited, they sound about the same as old analog telephone lines (so no low end and high freqs extend to about 4-5kHz) and whats worse, the wire recordings are very fragile and lose their sound faster than a dubplate acetate. Using one will get you a sound no doubt, but itll be so lofi that I’m not sure you couldnt reproduce it more or less 100% with processing, since there is very little nuance left in the recordings 
Here’s a bunch of wire recordings waiting to be digitized & restored at my workplace… Not looking forward to working these in tbh!
Can you share something about where you work and what you do there? This looks like it might be interesting to read more about. 
My day job (among other things) involves digitizing and restauration of audio sources from 2-track and multitrack analog tape, vinyl etc and also transferring audio from DAT tapes, DTRS and DASH tapes with timecode. Its all part of a massive project which exists in order to archive all the old broadcasting material into the cloud.
Its interesting and important work, but hella boring too at times.
Cool – there’s an awful lot of content there in wire – i would imagine there might be something worth discovering in that pile that will justify the work.
You don’t have to answer this question – but i wonder if there is something insurmountable in the technology that prevents higher quality, or would there be technical changes to improve it. Early, early tape has a lot of problems too, that got surmounted.
Back on topic, and with an affordable self recordable vinyl – there’s a product called Phonocut that’s in development right now through Kickstarter. It’s definitely got a reduction in sound quality but on the other hand it’s affordable, and has an interesting sound as well. There is a thread on Elektronauts, and the last post i put there is on a group of people that does one-off LP recording of much higher quality. So that sort of thing exists too.
(I don’t know if Phonocut does the compression digitally or not – but compression is easy enough to do in analog.)
yeah that phonocut is dope! I hope the kickstarter on that one goes well.
And yeh, sure enough, there’s culturally significant material in the stuff I’m transferring no doubt, but its also problematic in terms of copyright etc. So not sure yet what will happen to all of it in the near future at least. Most of it will probably be left unused, sadly.
As for the steel wire technology, it was precursor tech to actual analog tape, so thats what eventually became of it - A huge leap in sound quality, robustness and reliability!
It did – so for those with the cash and the interest it’s there for you. Interesting to think about all the ways people will use that thing.