Also covered by Tech Radar (2025) -- You need to be careful when buying new vinyl – the digital music loudness war can mean they sound worse than second-hand records: https://www.techradar.com/audio/turntables/you-need-to-be-ca...

Great website!

The main reason vinyl often sounds better is because it is better mastered, so this is concerning.

The fix is to disqualify album of the year eligibility for anything showing evidence of severe clipping. The industry would rapidly shape itself up.

Depending on which vinyl you're talking about. I care very little about big names signed to big corpo - they can do whatever they want to their vinyl. There are plenty of indi/underground artists releasing both on vinyl and tampe, who succumbed to nothing, but are alive and well actually. Check bandcamp more often for clues, should you disagree.

It's a weird social psychology quirk. For whatever reason, the entire music industry has been captured by the delusion that mixing all the sounds louder is good. No one likes it, except for those guys. For reasons I'll never understand, the movie industry has been captured by the opposite delusion; they're going to pump dynamic range so high that you can only understand about half the dialogue in the movie. And of course, no one likes this.

I mean it's inevitable that businesses will unify the pipelines. If there's profit in vinyl records, there's obviously more profit if you don't have to put any extra effort in.

The loudness war was never exclusive to digital audio formats though, it just reached saturation point [heh] with CDs. This didn't happen earlier because clipping isn't a thing on records -- saturation (practically some margin below that) is a hard limit.

Hard article to follow unfortunately. Also the only example it gives just shows a compressed waveform. I understand disliking that compared to the more dynamic older record, but a perfectly reasonable explanation for this would be: it sounds more like what buyers today expect.

I don't understand why they still release super compressed and loud masterings when most of the modern headphones are so good you don't really need to master for the old cheap stereo sets. And isn't headphones with Spotify the most common medium for music nowadays?

Are there any known ways to undo the compression? Assuming no clipping, the process should be reversible, right?