I am duty bound to start a thrad about the loudness war

[The Man]

I don't understand why this is still being done? There are absolutely NO advantages to this anymore, and shouldn't have been a thing in the first place.

The main reason is the erroneous belief that it sells more records. It is demonstrably not true, but large numbers of people still believe it. There are also probably some idiots that actually think it sounds better.

Most vinyl releases don't receive a separate mix, which is why vinyl isn't as infinitely superior as most sound gurus want us to believe.

Nearly all the vinyl releases I own very obviously have separate mixes from the CDs. Of course, I almost never buy records from major labels, so that's probably a large part of why. No record label worth its salt will release the same horribly compressed mix they use for their CDs on vinyl. (Major labels are, of course, not worth their salt). Granted, if the CD mix wasn't compressed in the first place, it's entirely possible the vinyl used the same mix as the CD, but in any case with the rips I've made the spectrals go all the way up to 48 kHz (as opposed to 22.05 kHz for the CDs) so there is still quite a bit more fidelity on vinyl.

That said, there are a few vinyl releases I am aware of that very obviously used horrible volume compression (RHCP - Californication, Burzum - Belus, Metallica - Death Magnetic. RHCP's Stadium Arcadium, by contrast, is an aversion of this trope; it was mastered by audiophile favourite Steve Hoffman and sounds much, much better than the CD, which was mastered by the aforementioned Vlado Meller and sounds every bit as horrible as the rest of his awful, awful mixes).

Thanks for the walkthrough TM, very thorough.

No problem. At this point I would amend it simply by pointing out that in many cases 99% threshold works much better than 95%. "Time's Scar" from Chrono Cross, for example, is horribly clipped (the second half of the track is a literal wall), and 95% threshold made no discernible difference. 99% recovered substantially more dynamic range - about 8 dB. One would not think that more sensitive threshold would work better, but in this case it did.