Vinyl Compression Dynamic Range

And this is for a mass produced commercial lp purchased second hand from a thrift store for around 1.

Vinyl compression dynamic range. As many of us know in a fair amount of digital masters the dynamic range is typically limited. There s very little compression so the loudest parts of those sounds often. That s why snare drums cymbal splashes and other loud instruments have so much more punch in vinyl recordings. The dynamic range meter is designed to give the same information as the popular pleasurize dynamic range meter.

The dynamic range of a direct cut vinyl record may surpass 70 db. 17 in late 2008 mastering engineer bob ludwig offered three versions of the guns n roses album chinese democracy for approval to co producers axl rose and caram costanzo. Lp s surface noise which is responsible for the poor dynamic range is mainly concentrated below 500hz where the noise level is around 50db. His post on why custom mastering for vinyl isn t necessary is well worth a read if you d like to know more about his take on the topic.

On the site users can search by artist or album. An album would have to be remastered to get the range back. He goes on to explain far more eloquently than i can why dynamic bass can cause the stylus to skip but ironically this can be solved by yet more compression reducing the dynamic range. Dynamic range compression is a lossy compression.

This is clearly a significant difference but what does this have to do with needle skipping. Analog fm broadcasts rarely have a dynamic range exceeding 50 db. Pcm of any flavor has a flat response to fs. The dynamic range of digital audio systems can exceed that of analog audio systems.

Any user can submit their test results to the site. The noise floor is even lower for an audiophile pressing on good quality vinyl. A vinyl record on the other hand only has about 55db to 65db of dynamic range. Vinyl can still push music to the limits of its dynamic range 55 70db but it often shies away from doing so in order to maintain sound quality.

When i cut a master for vinyl and a cd master from the same digital master tape they sounded pretty much the same except for the noise floor. The only signal that can exist between the bits of a cd is drowned out by random noise from the vinyl surface grain. A version of the album without dynamic range compression was included in the downloadable content for the video game guitar hero iii. Another significant impact of finite quantizing resolution is finite dynamic range.

As implemented the bit depth of cd and dvd digital audio formats accommodates a higher dynamic range than vinyl is capable of. Vinyl s dynamic range is dependant on frequency because vinyl doesn t have a flat maximum output curve.