i want to post a link to this here because it explains some further misunderstandings about vinyl v cd audio. one of the arguments you hear fro vinyl advocates is that cd mixes during the loudness wars are too aggressive in their limiting, and that's a valid debate that's specific to a genre of music that i basically don't listen to at all and consequently is of minimal relevance to me, but the argument continues that vinyl masters have less limiting due to playback issues and are a way to avoid the loudness wars. first, there's likely limited truth to this, as most vinyl masters are just digital masters with extra processing, namely more aggressive high and low pass filters. the vinyl mix of your favourite emo record probably isn't less compressed than the cd mix, but it does have a lower frequency range because vinyl cannot reproduce audio at the top or bottom of the audible frequency spectrum without damaging the equipment. that emo record was probably put through low and high pass filters that just cut large amounts of the frequency range out. this is worse than the compression of the loudness wars, but you notice it less because your amp has a bass boost and a treble boost. vinyl mastering is actually consequently a lot like mp3 compression and vinyl reproduction suffers from a lot of the same playback issues that mp3s do. the industry managed to confuse people by talking about sample rates instead, as though your brain isn't a quantum computer. guess what? your brain quantizes sound. yeah. it quantizes light, too. the key is to beat your brain at quantizing sound, and that's a trivial task with modern recording equipment. 24 bit/48khz is more than good enough to beat your brain at quantizing sound.

with newer masters, the issue is dumping digital masters to vinyl, which requires the mp3-style compression and mp3-style reproduction at the amplifier. not only is it not some approximation of audio in the natural world, or something, but it's really a lossy audio format, by today's digital audio standards. however, a lot of consumers prefer the compression because it sounds dull (like you're listening to a cd playing in the other room with the door closed, or with a blanket or wet towel over your head) and they don't like listening to higher frequencies, which is like too much information or something. maybe there's some evolutionary explanation around the aversion to the tmi in cd audio. maybe it's familiarity and a fear of change. maybe they're parroting others with little independent thought. the surveys of consumer preference for vinyl are real, if the science and the argumentation supporting the survey responses is not.

but for old audio (jazz and classical recorded before 1990), you have the opposite problem - the masters are filtered to cut out large parts of the frequency range in the original recording because the amplifier is supposed to have things like bass boosts and dolby noise reduction to reproduce the cut ranges. with bass, it's often just oomph and it doesn't work that badly. for the high range, the low pass on the old masters cut out substantive amounts of the overtones on the melodic instruments and detail in the percussion and you can't bring it back without going back to the masters. that's why it's so important to look for some indication that the digital remaster was from source tapes, as was the case with the contemporary jazz masters remaster series, which exclusively remastered old jazz recordings from source to bring back the frequency range that got cut out with the low pass on the analog masters.

consumers had a mixed response, unfortunately. many didn't understand why the new masters had more detail in the high ranges and complained of a "tinny" or "harsh" sound on the cd audio. that's an adjective to describe accurate sound reproduction, and an adverse reaction to it, out of a fear of the other. it's not what consumers were used to or expected and, broadly speaking, either nobody explained it to them or they failed to understand when it was explained. musicians and other people that understood what they were listening to reacted favourably, but they turned out to be the minority and, in the end, many of these classic recordings were re-remastered for cd to bring back the low pass, to cut out the increase in detail and to reproduce the dead sound of the vinyl master. this is a reflection of american dystopianism, of the idiocracy of late capitalism.

you do consequently need to be a little careful with these old recordings. the general rule is to look for the first remasters, if you want a full frequency response. if you do like the low pass, look for second or third remasters.

at this point, it might be too late to remaster a lot of these recordings from scratch, so an attempt should be made to identify what releases aren't degraded by the low passes and preserve them for future generations.

https://deathtokoalas.blogspot.com/p/columbia.html