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It's going to become the "MP3 sizzle" that young people at the time started to prefer once compressed audio became the norm on iPods and other portable music players, along with film grain and the judder of 24fps video. Artifacts imposed by the medium themselves become desirable once they become normal an associated and in fact signs of "quality", when, in fact, they are introduced noise and distortion to an otherwise more pristine or clean signal.

See also the "warmth" that certain vinyl enthusiasts sought after from their analog recordings which most certainly was mainly dust and defects in the groves rather than any actual tangible quality of the audio itself.



With vinyl warmth is the result of a deliberate process. Professional masters are done specifically for vinyl to accommodate its quirks which truly changes the sound. They have to clamp down the dynamic range and tidy low frequencies or the needle will skip. Recordings with lots of busy high frequency information also can’t be physically captured properly in the cut. The resulting master is a version that purposefully doesn’t have as many volume swings and harsh highs or boomy lows. Smooth, cohesive, warm. There are also track ordering strategies which is why ballads tend to be at the end of one side and the high energy stuff up front where there is “resolution” to serve it. The mastering engineer is adjusting each song with all this in mind.


Same vein https://open.substack.com/pub/animationobsessive/p/the-toy-s...

Pixar films were setup with the idea of being put on film so the DVD digital transfers color is all wrong.


In some cases, the artifacts of the medium can be desirable -- especially when consuming media that was created with those artifacts in mind.

Take a look at pixel art on CRTs vs LCDs [0] and Toy Story on film vs. digital [1].

[0]: https://wackoid.com/game/10-pictures-that-show-why-crt-tvs-a...

[1]: https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-toy-story-you-...


What most people think of "vinyl sound effects" are not what the "warmth" is about. That's just playback instability and waveform aliasing caused by shoddily made players.

Good vinyl is "wait, did we have this back in 1970s" good(the recorder yes, the player not exactly, hence the prevalence of vinyl sound effects)




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