Mastering for vinyl vs. streaming

High quality audio mastering requires detailed knowledge of how different playback mediums for music work at a fundamental level, as every playback medium has slightly different delivery specifications.

The analog vinyl medium is generally less forgiving than the digital streaming medium. In the digital realm, you can get away with pushing specifications in a manner that would result in unpleasant audible flaws, if applied to an analog vinyl record production. That can be an expensive mistake, when dealing with a production run of thousands of records.

This is part of the reason why old-school analog recordings tend to pass the test of time, even in our modern era of high-quality digital music production. When analog was the only option available, the engineering specifications were much tighter and less forgiving. Those technical barriers to entry inside of the audio engineering field resulted in a lot of great recordings made by highly qualified and highly experienced professionals, and they tend to still sound great, even today.

Here’s a few of the specific technical differences between masters optimized for streaming digital vs. vinyl.

Low frequency differences between analog and digital production

Digital low frequencies

In the digital world, any frequency humans can hear is fair game to play around with. Lowest frequency use in a mix is limited mostly by the types of speakers and playback equipment the average consumer tends to listen back on.

It’s important to remember that not everyone listening to your music has subwoofers, or the ability to reproduce the very lowest frequencies in an acoustically controlled environment. So, when you’re mixing I’d try to keep most of your musical ideas inside of a frequency range where a majority of people will be able to hear what you’re doing in a more casual listening environment. Practically speaking, that means minimizing anything below 40 Hz to just a few instruments, and keeping your most important ideas above the 40 Hz line.

If you don’t do this, you’ll be limiting who can hear those ideas, as a super low frequency idea inside of your mix will completely disappear if an audience member is listening back on small built-in computer or cell phone speakers.

The “Christopher Nolan effect” in audio

Starting around the release of the film Interstellar, filmmaker Christopher Nolan made the conscious choice to mix his films only for those watching inside of a movie theatre using a professionally calibrated sound system. While that’s certainly his choice, it also leaves a lot of casual film fans completely out in the cold. And, as a result, his film work has become a bit notorious for often having inaudible dialogue.

The dialogue would be clearer, if watching inside of a movie theatre that’s been professionally set up. But, when watching on a computer, or using headphones or earbuds, or smaller speakers, or if the particular movie theatre in your small town hasn’t been professionally calibrated, you can have trouble hearing the words being spoken by the actors.

This kind of thing has gotten so bad recently that many consumer TVs now have a “dialogue mode” that attempts to make dialogue clearer. Compare this to older movies made in the 1960-90s that don’t usually have these kinds of problems with dialogue.

Mixing and mastering to the average common gear denominator means audio that sounds great everywhere, no matter what level of gear you’re listening on. It’s important to consider making your work approachable and enjoyable for all listeners, not just the ones who might own expensive sound systems.

Vinyl low frequencies

For a vinyl production, low frequency specifications are more strict than in the digital medium. For vinyl, try to use the very lowest 20-40 Hz range minimally, if at all, perhaps limiting its use to just a single instrument.

If you over-use the very lowest range of the sub bass in a vinyl production, particularly for the final 1-2 tracks on the side of a record, you can cause audible distortions to be cut into your record, especially if those very lowest frequencies are also very loud in volume. In mastering, we call this inner-groove distortion.

This happens because audio wavelengths get compressed as the diameter of the disc shrinks closest to the center, and there’s less physical space available to execute the cut. Loud and low frequencies also always take up more physical space inside of the record groove than do middle and high frequencies, so there’s even less room for them as the disc diameter gets smaller.

This is the reason why older analog recordings tend to sound much dryer in the extreme low end than our modern digital recordings. Back when The Beatles were recording, the primary consumer playback medium available at the time (vinyl) couldn’t handle lots of powerful low end. So, the engineers had to filter that area quite aggressively during mixing and mastering, more so than what we’d need to do today using modern digital playback mediums.

Production solutions

Inner-groove distortion can be mitigated to a significant degree by proper track sequencing (maybe use that bass-heavy track as the first track on a side, not the last), and by using masters that are made specifically for vinyl. It’s why I often recommend paying for dedicated vinyl masters that are separate from your digital masters, when producing a vinyl record.

Any qualified mastering engineer should be walking you through all of these potential sonic issues, and the steps that can be taken to mitigate them, during the mastering process and before you send your tracks off to your vinyl pressing provider.

In part 2 of this series, we’ll compare how phase correlation works between vinyl and digital mediums.