[dobyblue]

Originally Posted by Xcacel

I am not an expert, but from random reading, I don’t think that the dynamic range is directly related to the audio quality.

Here are the DR values for all DMB albums:

https://dr.loudness-war.info/album/l...atthews&album=

Love that list! lol

I uploaded the vast majority of those, which is why the formatting of the LT and DMBLive series is very uniform - I would never claim DR is anything but one facet of overall quality. However, in the vast majority of cases where the vinyl release is mastered separately to a day and date release by the same mastering engineer, the DRC is typically the major, if not the only, difference.

To that point the Peppers50 vinyl release was the best choice as it was the only one with no peak limiting - Miles Showell confirmed there were zero other differences (eQ etc). The Blu-ray inexplicably had the peak limited 24/96 stereo master on it. By the time they did The Beatles50 they had listened to "our" complaints and the Blu-rays from that point onwards included the unlimited vinyl cutting master and they eased off on the DRC they had used with Peppers (even the surround master was pretty hot).

Quality has so many factors, as an example for some bit depth and sampling rate is of utmost importance - I would rather have well-mastered 320 Kbps mp3s than aggressively mastered 24/96 FLACs. For me, anything with heavy-handed DRC cannot be considered audiophile.