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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • Vinyl has to be mastered differently (using the RIAA equalization curve) because vinyl is a crap medium. Low frequencies, unequalized, can cause the stylus to jump out of the groove. High frequencies tend to be attenuated. And it’s noisy as well, and the noise gets worse over time. The “warmth” afiicionados treasure is mainly harmonic distortion from the amp reconsituting the equalized sound.

    On a solid system, there’s a lot more fidelity in the bass on vinyl.

    See above. Bass has to be compressed in order to be written to vinyl in a way that doesn’t damage the record on playback. The amp then decompresses it before you hear it. Compression and decompression do not increase fidelity, instead what you get is a decompressed signal with the same reduced resolution as the compressed signal on the vinyl. In other words, you lose fidelity during the compression process, and information which is lost cannot be put back in later.