just in response to the earlier posts about the source material being the same. a wav file ie source, pressed onto vinyl WILL sound better. not by a great deal, but it will. because to get from your computer running perhaps 24bit audio to a 16 bit cd. effectively "digitises" the track even more, so your chopping the track up into little bits. you put it on vinyl and there is no chopping, its a pure analog waveform. so regardless of what mastering is done on a track, it will sound better on vinyl. and if you've turned the wav into a mp3, even at 320 kpbs you've compressed a 100MB wav into 20MB file or whatever size, there IS some loss, not very noticable but compared to a vinyl version of the same track, you should be able to spot the difference. mainly in the extreme highs and lows.
a good mastering house will pass the wav file which is 24 bit at the very least out through very expensive AD convertors, through racks of gear and then store on an analog medium like DAT maybe and then press to vinyl. so no more AD conversion in the chain, which leaves you with a much purer signal than if you did the same mastering process but had to convert BACK to 16 bit for CD.

all good fun

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Originally posted by CLICK_RAREVINYL But regardless of sidechaining the electronic music genre has always been the loudest of them all sixofour.

I dunno, metal is pretty insane in this regard... especially the really hardcore stuff.

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Bitching about the loudness war on the production forum of tranceaddict is like protesting porn while running a sex shop. It is going to make you look silly.

I'm gonna disagree with this. A sex shop is going to contain porn inherently. Electronic music does not have to be squashed to all oblivion... that's just the common trend. (As with most current music.)

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Originally posted by david.michael I'm gonna disagree with this. A sex shop is going to contain porn inherently. Electronic music does not have to be squashed to all oblivion... that's just the common trend. (As with most current music.)

Exactly. I tend to avoid compression in most cases, but then again I can get away with it because most of the time I'm not making clubby tracks.



Also, one thing people sometimes forget is that vinyl mastering is different because of the loudness limitations of the vinyl medium itself. It's simply impossible to totally squash a song if it's going to be pressed to vinyl, because the record won't play properly if the audio is too squashed as much as on some digital recordings. If that physical limitation weren't in place, who knows what engineers would have been pushed to do back in the day?

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Originally posted by sixofour.604 People act as if being mp3 vs vinyl or being mastered is what makes or breaks a track, sorry, but if a track is good, the minor details don't mean much, and if the track is bad, putting glitter won't change it, tiesto.

+1 ...like a mofo!

quote:

Originally posted by CLICK_RAREVINYL But regardless of sidechaining the electronic music genre has always been the loudest of them all sixofour.

This hasn't been my experience. Yes, it's up against it, and on average has become even louder in the last few years, but the kick drum is a big limiting factor in terms of pushing the loudness up even higher.

Rock and pop music don't have that limitation, they can have tiny kicks and masses of midrange, which will be much louder, comparatively.

As other people have said, nobody is forcing us to do this to our own music. There are some artists who use a wider dynamic range. Not all trance is subject to the loudness war. Just most of it.

Dude it's not as bad as everyone makes it out to be. I have listened to tons of genres in depth and trance is one of the better production wise. It's up there in the loudness but when you are making tracks for people to dance to; isn't that kind of to be expected that people will take it a little too far?

Anyway there are ways to avoid it. If you're mixing you simply don't turn the track up as loud when you're using it. If you're casually listening, ipods have normalizers on them now and i'm sure WMP will very soon.