Many more passionate music listeners prefer the more intimate listening experience that is vinyl. It makes sense when you think about it. Listening to vinyl requires much more of an investment in both time and money on the part of the listener. It costs more to purchase an album on vinyl typically, and it can’t be listened to on the go. This is why it’s typically the more passionate music fan who collects and listens to vinyl, as it takes a lot more effort to listen to something on vinyl rather than listening to the same song on your phone while you’re driving or working out.

While it’s a more involved process listening to vinyl, it’s a more involved process creating that vinyl record. It’s also a substantially different process when you create a vinyl recorded versus a compact disc version of the same material. Let’s explain in this article how is mastering for vinyl different than mastering for compact disc.

First, it’s different on an audio processing level much of the time mastering for vinyl versus compact disc. Compact discs offer much more dynamic and frequency ranges than their vinyl counterparts. For instance, you can listen to a symphony with all of the rises, falls, and loud crescendos just fine on compact disc. On vinyl, it’s near impossible to replicate that same amount of dynamic range because of the size of the grooves which is necessary to reproduce that range. As I also alluded to, vinyl has issues reproducing deep, booming lows and has issues with certain higher frequencies like too much sibilance.

Some masters for compact disc can translate to vinyl without issue if you don’t have a lot of instances of dynamic and large frequency ranges, but it’s something to keep in mind if you do to the point where a separate master could be required to translate that album to vinyl without any issues.

Something else to consider with vinyl is the sequencing of an album. On a compact disc it doesn’t matter where you place different tracks as the laser which reads a CD doesn’t have issues with peaks and valleys in dynamics and frequencies. On vinyl, you have to remember that the longer a side of a record plays, the less true its dynamics can be reproduced. For this reason, the most dynamic and typically loudest tracks should be positioned at the beginning of each side, to occupy the outer edges of the record where the grooves can occupy more space and thusly accommodate more dynamics. Quieter songs which don’t travel as much dynamic ground can be placed closer to the inside of the record.

Aside from that, mastering for vinyl is similar to CD. The engineer creates a PQ sheet to represent the gaps and tracklist of the album top to bottom which the vinyl cutter will take into consideration when figuring how to position the songs on the album. Another limitation of the medium of vinyl is that you can’t really get more than 20 minutes of audio per side for a 12” before the audio quality really starts to drop off and certain frequencies aren’t represented as faithfully as they were as they were tracked in the studio or in the audio itself.

Limitations aside, many people prefer the sound of vinyl and consequently the market for it is growing with every day as more and more generations and people who take their music more seriously are exposed to it. If you’re interested in a vinyl master from us here at Online-Audio-Mastering.com, begin with a cost and risk free sample master to decide if our engineers are the right fit for your music firsthand.