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Comment by shmageggy | Hacker News Reader

Mastering for vinyl is very common in the industry. I don't have time to dig up a reference right now, but the medium has different constraints than digital so is usually mastered separately, especially for big budget stuff. The differing constraints are mainly that while CD has a hard amplitude limit (hence brickwall limiting), the constraint on vinyl is not hard in the same way -- it mostly has to do with amplitude of low frequencies and skipping grooves.

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I agree that mastering for vinyl happens, but you're not right about the dynamic range. CDs were popular initially because they have a wider dynamic range, the overly compressed / "loudness wars" tracks are nowhere near the limits of the medium. It is true that vinyl these days often has wider dynamic range - because the market for how songs sound is different for people buying vinyl, so they're mastered with wider range.

The comment was not about dynamic range, but the nature of the upper amplitude limit (hard vs soft/frequency dependent). That says nothing about the dynamic range, which is still a creative decision during mastering. I was trying to point out that vinyl mastering is common (contrary to parent post) and that one reason is the technical differences between mediums. I agree, though, that market pressures are a strong driver of the differing creative choices during mastering, but the decision to master separately for vinyl is often indepenent of that.

My understanding is that with vinyl, if the signal has too high of an RMS at low frequencies the needle can literally skip off the groove, and for this reason vinyl can't necessarily be as compressed and loud..

    • The audio is subjected to low-pass or all-pass 
  filtering, which can result in broad peaks becoming 
  slanted ramps.
    • The amount and stereo separation of deep bass content 
  is reduced for vinyl, to keep the stylus from being 
  thrown out of the groove.

http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_%28Vinyl%29...

http://www.laweekly.com/music/why-cds-may-actually-sound-bet...

Not necessarily, but full-power vinyl grooves would cause all sorts of distortion and misbehavior for the very mechanical nature of cartridges and tonearms. Likewise, high frequencies would be so small they couldn't really be picked up.

Hence the RIAA curve, which is an eq curve applied to the mastering before put to vinyl that reduces the lows and exaggerates the highs. It is reversed by the phono preamp during playback.

This is true. Mastering for vinyl is basically a completely different set of skills than mastering for other media.

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