u/Brian2005l

Millennial audiophile here looking for the best versions of albums from the indie music world from ~1995-2015 (which I guess we’re calling indie sleaze even though “aught rock” was right there). This is the peak of the so-called loudness wars when the conventional wisdom was that CDs had to be very heavily compressed to sell, and bands like the Arcade Fire, the Shins, MGMT, etc. have heavy compression on a lot of their most iconic albums.

Happily it was also the beginning of the vinyl revival, and while some of that was snake oil, at least some bands really did put out unique and better masterings on vinyl. It’s just hard to tell what’s what since DR comparisons between vinyl and digital are an unreliable indicator a lot of the time.

So what indie albums have you heard that are mixed or mastered significantly better/differently on vinyl? Anyone done any spectral analysis?

TLDR: your streaming devices are probably messing with your audio.

Just wanted to share in case anyone else had this issue. After years of this hobby, I finally started really paying attention to the connection between my playback devices and my DAC, and it’s one of the most immediately audible upgrades I’ve done.

My speakers are hooked up to my TV. Because of convenience, I’d fallen into streaming from services or a media server through the TV or a Shield or other device. Sometimes I plugged a computer or phone into a USB.

What I discovered is that virtually every device forces the audio through a mixing pipeline (built into the TV or Windows or Android) so that you can, for example, add sound effects or audio from multiple programs. I knew something was happening bc I saw the sample rate being messed with, but I had assumed that this was just resampling and was harmless.

Nope. Finally built a bit-perfect player on a raspberry pi, and holy crap does it make a difference. Not only were my devices resampling, they were introducing phase artifacts and aggressive EQing (I thought there was something wrong with my room) and possibly other DSP. It’s easy to A-B bc I can simultaneously stream to different DAC inputs snd toggle them, and it’s night and day now.

$100 bucks and maybe a couple hours and for the very first time my system sounds like a demo in a store.