I don't know if this is still true, but I know that in the 2000s the vinyls usually were mastered better than the CDs. There even was a website comparing CD vs vinyl releases, where the person hosting it was lamenting this fact because objectively CDs have a much higher dynamic range than vinyls, although I can't find it now. CDs were a victim of the loudness war[0].
Allegedly, for a lot of music that is old enough the best version to get (if you have the kind of hifi system that can make use of it) is an early 80s CD release, because it sits in a sweet spot of predating the loudness war where producers actually using the dynamic range of the CD.
The loudness wars were mostly an artifact of the 90s-2010s, because consumers were listening on horrible plasticky iPod earbuds or cheap Logitech speakers and the music had to sound good on those.
Once better monitors became more commonplace, mastering became dynamic again.
This is most clear with Metallica's Death Magnetic, which is a brickwalled monstrosity on the 2008 release but was fixed on the 2015 release[0]. And you can see this all over, where albums from the 90s had a 2000s "10-year anniversary" remaster that is heavily compressed, but then a 2010s or 2020s remaster that is dynamic again.
[0] Interestingly enough between those dates, fans extracted the non-brickwalled Guitar Hero tracks and mastered them as well as they could. Fun times :).
Right, that makes sense. And it also makes sense that vinyls didn't suffer from this because the people who would buy those would use them at home with better speakers. Or that classical music CDs throughout the entire period made great use of the dynamic range, since that also is more likely to be listened to on high quality speakers.
Vinyl literally cannot be brickwalled because the needle can't handle it. That's also why vinyl can't handle heavy bass, it'll make the needle vibrate out of the groove. It has nothing to do with the speakers.
It was sort of a happy coincidence that vinyl's limitations forced more dynamic (but less bass-y) masters. Although if your artist didn't do vinyl releases -which really was a dying medium until hipsters brought it back in the 2010s- you were hosed.
> Vinyl literally cannot be brickwalled because the needle can't handle it.
Interesting, I did not know this! I'm not doubting you, but I'm a little confused and curious about how the physics of that works out. Wouldn't being brickwalled mean the volume stays pretty constant, meaning there's less work for the needle? Or is there some kind of limit to how many overlapping waveforms a needle can pick up at once?
Bit of a lesson incoming, skip to the vinyl bit if you don't care for that:
"Dynamic range compression" is a bit of a misleading term because it sounds like you're taking an audio signal and and squeezing it.
What you're really doing is two things: reducing (compressing) the difference between the quiet (valleys) and loudest (peaks) parts, and then pushing the volume of the peaks up to or past 0dB. Technically, that second step isn't dynamic range compression, but in practice it is / was always done. The reason they do this is because for human ears, louder sounds better. However, you lose dynamism. Imagine if you watched a movie, and a whisper during a military night raid would sound as loud as the shouty conversation they had in the planning room.
Past 0dB, a signal will 'clip'[0], which means the loudest parts of the signal cannot be expressed properly and will be cut off, leading to signal loss. Basically, 0dB is the loudest you can get.
These days, in practice, music tracks get mastered so that the average value is -14dB because streaming sites will 'normalize' tracks so that the average dB is -14dB. Here[1] you can see why that makes brickwalling bad. If your track goes full tilt and has almost no valleys, the average dB per second is rather high, so your entire track gets squeezed to average out to -14dB. But if you have lots of valleys, you can have more peaks and the average will still be -14dB!
RE: vinyl? Well, too much and / or too intense motion in the groove (the groove is effectively a physical waveform) makes the needle slightly skip out of the groove. "Too much" happens with brickwalling, "too intense" happens with very deep bass. Try to imagine the upcoming links I'm referring to as a physical groove a needle has to track, instead of a digital waveform.
Here[2] is one Death Magnetic track waveform of the brickwalled original vs. fixed remastered release. It's not too bad. But then there is this[3] insanity.
Allegedly, for a lot of music that is old enough the best version to get (if you have the kind of hifi system that can make use of it) is an early 80s CD release, because it sits in a sweet spot of predating the loudness war where producers actually using the dynamic range of the CD.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war