"In theory, cd has far more dynamic range than vinyl. In practice, it has great deal less! This is a result of modern "loudness war" mastering. Most modern albums have less than 6db of actual dynamic range. Listen to something with more range than that, and it sounds flat and lifeless. Vinyl is usually mastered with significantly more dynamic range, but sounds more open and breathy - the way more dynamic range should sound."

Garbage in, garbage out. What you're really saying is that good masters beat bad masters - nothing to do with vinyl at all. In the context of the larger discussion, this is disingenuous; the return of vinyl means that the new stuff will have the same "loudness war" problems that the digital stuff has. Unless you're claiming that artists are saving a super-duper special master just for their vinyl customers.

In a larger sense, this comment exemplifies the fallacy of gray[1]. Just because neither of them are perfectly accurate doesn't mean that CDs aren't more accurate.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/mm/the_fallacy_of_gray/

To be absolutely clear here - I don't give two shits about "accurate". I care about reproducing the emotional content of the music. As a musician and a recording engineer, I take this stuff very seriously. I find the arguments for "accurate" to be utter nonsense 99% of the time, completely removed from the experience of music creation by people who have zero experience actually making music.

As for the fallacy of gray and the idea of loudness wars in vinyl mastering... nope. Two reasons. First, the loudness wars are a function of competitive reproduction on the radio or television. That competition doesn't really exist in the vinyl world, where listeners tend to listen to an entire album in a sitting. Second, it's not physically viable to make vinyl records much louder than they already are. High RMS volumes can make the needle jump the groove, or introduce a lot of downstream distortion (not the pretty kind).

Rather than fallacy of gray, this is more like saying you should eat with a bucket rather than a spoon because a bucket can hold larger bites. It doesn't matter if digital is technically "better" if there's no good way to take advantage of the additional benefits in can provide in practice.

(This all said, I'll record in digital rather than on tape, any day. The editing and management benefits are tremendous.)

I just complained about the post you're complaining about, but I'm also going to complain about yours.

There is actually a "super-duper special master just for vinyl" in many cases, with more dnamic range. The reason I've heard for that happening, though this could be wrong, is that the needle would be more likely to jump out of the groove with the loudness that CD masters are often getting. Whether that's true or not, the vinyl release often has a different, less compressed master. Some people rip the vinyl versions to digital for that reason.

Skipping is caused by high acceleration, so vinyl masters might use something called "acceleration limiting". The vinyl master might also mix the bass down to mono. So, in order to fix problems with needles jumping out of the groove, the solution is actually to apply more limiting and not less.

Vinyl has also been a production afterthought since about 1990. You'd create a stereo mixdown and send it to the mastering engineer--but by then it would often have some master bus compression already applied to it, equalization, and limiting. The mastering engineer would spend most of their time, day in and day out, working with music meant for CDs, and maybe they'd tweak the CD master a little bit to make it acceptable for vinyl. So, basically, by the time the loudness war started, people didn't care enough about vinyl to make a special vinyl master, and by the time the vinyl resurgence hit us, the loudness war was mostly over.

Hell, there's a ton of vinyl out there where they used the CD as a master, rather than using the original mixdown. The mastering engineer will cut a normal CD and send it to another mastering engineer which specializes in vinyl.

Of course, there are exceptions. There are records mastered separately for CD and vinyl, and there are artists who would deliver pristine mixdowns to the mastering engineers. But the vast majority of vinyl releases are not special. There are even plenty of cases where the vinyl master was butchered a bit compared to the CD.

I'm not trying to argue that CDs are better than vinyl in practice. I'm just arguing that there's not a technical reason to prefer vinyl, at least for most releases. If the difference you perceive is important to you, then the difference is real.

That's changing these days, as vinyl mastering becomes a forethought and not an afterthought, and cds are going the way of the dodo, in favor of compressed digital formats like mp3. Vinyl is selling well and is profitable. And it's not selling because people are pretentious hipsters who don't understand quality. It's selling because vinyl creates a better listening experience. People are getting back to listening to music other than as something to decorate their jogging.

The "better listening experience" is a tired argument, if you have a sentimental / emotional attachment to vinyl then the advantage is very real but for those of us not attached to the medium the listening experience is not better.

Vinyl may sell "well" but not if you compare it to other media, such as CDs. Even though CDs continue to collapse in popularity they still move 8x as many units as vinyl (and they're more durable, smaller, higher fidelity, etc). Albums instead are getting mastered for iTunes and Spotify, and that's had a much better effect on master quality than the vinyl resurgence.

I'm in audio too, and while what you say is true, it feels kind of like saying digital photography is worse than film if everyone's shooting with their exposure set five stops up. Then you can say "digital's clearly worse - look how blown out it all is!"

The loudness war is unfortunate, but a CD can be used properly to have plenty more dynamic range and plenty less noise than a record.

There are other benefits to analogue formats though, like soft clipping.

Well, yeah. But that's a different issue than the "accuracy" line that's brought up by dudes who don't play instruments and have never mixed a song (or alternately, have little experience at professional-level photography and couldn't tell you the three factors of exposure if you asked).

This same argument has been made forever in photography too. There's no hope for "accuracy". Even if you ignore the obvious facts like 2-dimensional representation and tiny form, even just the light itself is something that is at best interpreted artistically by the photographer.

Good photography is about producing a piece of art which represents and evokes a scene the photographer saw. Film is a tool for doing that and the entire process surrounding it influences the choices the photographer/developer/printer makes in their interpretation of the scene. Digital is just another tool and has it's own downsides (its own "loudness war" for that matter, too).