Vinyl requires compression within a certain range - too little or too much is no good.
Digital allows for far higher compression - historically digital released have been compressed to hell into a "brick" with very little actual dynamic range. This is so that when they're played on radio they're going to sound louder than anything else. Vinyl doesn't allow for this same amount of compression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
Modern streaming services will recompress songs to a common standard, negating all of the loudness war stuff, but I haven't looked at new releases to see if heavy compression is still common practice on the master releases but I'd assume they still do it because practices change slowly. In that case they're just throwing away bit depth for no reason.
> Modern streaming services will recompress songs to a common standard, negating all of the loudness war stuff, but I haven't looked at new releases to see if heavy compression is still common practice on the master releases but I'd assume they still do it because practices change slowly.
I assume good mastering engineers create dedicated masters for each major streaming service because of their different requirements.
Digital allows for far higher compression - historically digital released have been compressed to hell into a "brick" with very little actual dynamic range. This is so that when they're played on radio they're going to sound louder than anything else. Vinyl doesn't allow for this same amount of compression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
Modern streaming services will recompress songs to a common standard, negating all of the loudness war stuff, but I haven't looked at new releases to see if heavy compression is still common practice on the master releases but I'd assume they still do it because practices change slowly. In that case they're just throwing away bit depth for no reason.