Loudness wars in 1970s

[magiccarpetride]

I was listening to the original pressing of Santana "Welcome" last night. Side 1 strikes me as being mastered very 'hot'. It is a beautifully sounding record, no doubt, with incredible depth/width both in frequency range and in dynamics.

But when the stylus reached the last track ("Yours Is The Light"), all hell broke loose! The bass kicked off super, super loud, almost the loudest bass I've ever heard on my system. Which is okay, but the rest of the band sounded seriously 'brickwalled'. Like one of those horrendous CDs from the shameful period of the early-mid 2000s.

That surprised me -- I thought that such level of ultra loud compression, with almost zero db in dynamics, was not possible to achieve on vinyl?

[Macca]

I was listening to the original pressing of Santana "Welcome" last night. Side 1 strikes me as being mastered very 'hot'. It is a beautifully sounding record, no doubt, with incredible depth/width both in frequency range and in dynamics.

But when the stylus reached the last track ("Yours Is The Light"), all hell broke loose! The bass kicked off super, super loud, almost the loudest bass I've ever heard on my system. Which is okay, but the rest of the band sounded seriously 'brickwalled'. Like one of those horrendous CDs from the shameful period of the early-mid 2000s.

That surprised me -- I thought that such level of ultra loud compression, with almost zero db in dynamics, was not possible to achieve on vinyl?

It isn't - are you sure isn't your system? ;)


Don't forget last track on a side suffers most from IGD, ideally they should put something a bit slow and mellow there rather than a full on rocker to minimise the problem but that doesn't always happen.