Red Hot Chili Peppers vinyl sounds better than CD

[geonerd]

God, that's just brutal!

[amoergosum3]

Stop The Loudness War!

[GerSHAK]

The vinyl version is still a victim of the loudness war and much less dynamic than the mastermix has to have been. It doesn't compare at all to the awesomeness that was the Stadium Arcadium vinyl. Still at least a bit nicer than the CD.

[masteringmedia]

@lucadepu In fact the same studio AND engineer mastered both these versions ! I can think of a few possibilities about why they sound different:

a) Whoever wanted the CD to be "as loud as possible" didn't oversee the vinyl release, or didn't care as much what the CD sounded like

b) They deliberately want the vinyl to sound better, because the market has "audiophile" expectations of the format, or to persuade people to buy multiple versions or...

[masteringmedia]

@lucadepu

c) They saw the negative reaction to the original and decided to put it right

Personally I think (a) is the most likely explanation...

[lucadepu]

am i wrong? cd's got less dynamic range because of the digital audio compromises ( compression / fromat encoding?)

[masteringmedia]

@lucadepu No - CD is technically capable of greater dynamic range than vinyl.

[slider2699]

So, why do artists let this happen? A band like RHCP, who are talented musicians, let their work be hidden by bad mastering. Yet they go to the effort to have a vinyl version released. I've heard the vinyl of IWY and Stadium Arcadium, and they sound like different records than the CDs. Then kids buy Beats headphones to compensate. A good vinyl rip and my $40 PortaPros sounds way better than a CD and Beats. The young will never fully hear the artists' vision at this rate.

[masteringmedia]

@slider2699 I think the band defer to "experts" - in this case, Rick Rubin and his engineers, probably. They think that people prefer heavily compressed music.

Sadly, when it gets to these extremes at least, the "experts" are wrong :

productionadvice.co.uk/researc­h-loudness-sales/

[LandyGerhardt]

@slider2699 The Vinyl was mastered by a kind of new kid to the mastering scene who has skills. The CD was mastered by this complete moron named "Vlado Meller" who has been mastering since mono tape but still has no education in the subject. He also destroyed the white stripes vinyl records, but they are over rated anyway.

[pstamatiou]

Obviously vinyl is better, but that is because the mastering engineers cannot push the loudness of the vinyl as high as the cd version, because the niddle would skip. So they print it in normal listening db, which results in a much better listening experience. the cd version is so compressed to sound as loud as possible to the point the dynamics are dead squashed...

[masteringmedia]

@pstamatiou Actually, that's a myth. It's perfectly possible to master vinyl with hyper-compressed material - for example, Metallica's "Death Magnetic" sounds virtually identical on CD and vinyl.

"Needle-jumps" are actually caused by very dynamic (and bassy) material - in fact the Beatles first started using compression on their masters precisely so they could be cut hotter.

[pstamatiou]

@masteringmedia nice one, i stand corrected. thanks for the reply.

[batmansmk]

The thing I don't get is why the CD version is in Aiff..Usually cd is WAV right ? How did you record the two versions ?

[masteringmedia]

@batmansmk CD is raw PCM - you can save it any format you like when you rip it. I use a Mac, and the default is AIFF

[philwilks1982]

The CD sounds awful by comparison. I really hope that some day soon we'll be able to purchase "mastered" and "unmastered" versions of songs – of course the unmastered version will still have been mastered, but just not with the same clipped-until-it-hurts attitude.