There is the concept that constraints drive artists to make better art within the defined limits. Vinyl has so much less tonal and dynamic information recording capacity than CDs... today’s artists spend more effort and energy “exploring the limits” rather than creating great art. Outside of classical music and opera, what forms of music are unquestionably better on CD than vinyl or cassette?
I have some Dire Straits albums from around 1990 on CD, and they sound amazing. Mastering seemed to go way downhill in the late 90s.
Cassette has no advantage for me other than nostalgia, and the fact that a lot of music wouldn't exist without such a cheaply available recording medium.
The remastering for CD would be from the original recording which were usually 24 IPS (or was it 39?) AMPEX tape. Those tapes held massive amounts of sonic data so remastering for CD was really a step down. Since the target medium was one where you didn’t have such strict dynamic limits in the last ten minutes of a side (eg: you weren’t going to make the needle jump out of the groove of the dynamics exceeded the limits of vinyl) you can get a fuller sound all the way through the album. This attention to detail of the constraints was something that was in the minds of the songwriter, composer, the performers, and the engineers. These day... “record at 96khz and we’ll fix it in post” but no amount of post-production can fix an inferior composition.
Humor isn't frowned upon, but comments that are limited to pure wit are, just because everybody likes them in the small, but nobody wants them to dominate the discussion in the large.
While I do agree that mixing for records produces a pretty good sounding final product (and for many people the best sounding album), you are still constrained to the laws of physics. If you have a track that’s mixed too hot, you’ll just throw the needle out and get skipping. I’ve heard of this happening with some rock and electronic albums. With a digital release, the whole album can be mixed however the artist wants.
I’m pretty sure most artists don’t really think about the limitations of vinyl when creating the album. It’s not a constraint for them, after all digital version is going to be the most consumed one.
