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Comment by throwaway2037 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway2037

Do vinyl and CDs of the exact same album have different mixes? I find this very hard to believe, or the amount of human involvement must be very low -- software automation. My point: In 2023, what record label could defend the cost of expensive audio engineers to remix an album just for vinyl. The realized, absolute profits on vinyl must be tiny at this point. And when I wrote profit, I do not mean profit margin, which will be very large on small sales revenue

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I'm a professional musician who makes a good portion of my "living" selling recorded music. You use the same mix for all mediums but need to master differently for vinyl. (Mix refers to levels of individual microphones, mastering is the frequency levels of the finished mix) I'm sure some people master different for digital outlets, but we don't. Regarding profitability,it's so much easier to sell vinyl than cds it's a challenge keeping them in stock, and pretty much every vinyl plant on earth is backlogged right now. Also the return of an lp vs. spotify is orders of magnitude higher; our Spotify income is barely quantifiable. (maybe bc we didn't specially master for it ha?)

Usually, yes. Albums have the RIAA curve applied. CDs typically do not, except for many of those produced in the mid-1980's when the studios were producing CDs as fast as they could and didn't want to spend the time to remaster a recording for the flat response of the CD.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization

The problem in the 1980s was they were starting with master tapes that already had the RIAA equalization whereas today the masters are digital and don't. So for a modern title the RIAA curve would be added for a tape to be sent to the lathe, and probably would be done when the signal is analog.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc2LA9kC-4U

One of the phenomena of some records is that excessive bass can cause the needle to jump out of the groove.

Tchaikovsky*, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Erich Kunzel – 1812 : https://www.discogs.com/release/2205254-Tchaikovsky-Cincinna...

> Amazing recording! The sonic mastering on this one is outstanding. Make sure you have your stylus and needle prepared for the canon blasts in the 1812 overture! Take a look at how wide the grooves are near the end of Side 1! I had to adjust my tone-arm weight so the needle didn't get thrown off the track or skip. This is a great listen and sounds amazing.

https://www.talkbass.com/threads/mccartney-and-old-time-need... also has some discussion about the mixing of bass for records.

So there are very real reasons why a record would have a different mix than a CD.

This appears to be one more real reason why vinyl is objectively worse than a CD.

> Do vinyl and CDs of the exact same album have different mixes?

Certainly sometimes. In fact probably always - you can't just take analogue masters and dump them to digital - you have to do at least some mixing and filtering.

As a single datapoint, Frank Zappa's Hot Rats was remixed for CD; I hated the CD remix, which I thought was too harsh (I'm not the only person who felt that way). Also, there are differences in the actual music: the intro to Gumbo Variations, for example, is a couple of bars longer in the CD remix than the original vinyl.

I've got used to the CD remix now, and I appreciate the extended into to Gumbo Variations.

[Edit] Am I the only person that found the article impossible to read, because it was jiggling around so fast?

I think typically there's only one mix, but there will be as many masters as the mediums you're targetting: one master for CD, one for Spotify, one for vinyl, etc.

What would you do differently mastering for a CD versus Spotify?

(I'm in the middle of releasing an album, and we don't have different masters for these, but I could imagine that the situation is different for more professional groups)

Spotify compresses it anyway but for digital audio you'd want to encode in 48 kHZ/24 bit whereas CD only supports 44.1 kHZ/16 bit. Anyone who can hear the difference would be an exceptional listener with an exceptional sound system though, at least assuming the masters are generated with proper dithering.

We're getting our audio onto Spotify via CDBaby's distribution program, and they require 44.1 kHZ/16 bit.

(I initially tried uploading 24bit and they rejected it.)

Oh. Well, even more reason to make sure you use proper dithering.

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