A digital recording has to be mastered with the understanding that it could end up getting played on a car stereo, on a bluetooth boombox, on cell phone speakers, in bluetooth earbuds, at a dance party with a DJ or on a hi-fi stereo setup that looks like the one from the old Maxell "blown away" ad. A recording on a vinyl record doesn't. The person mastering a record doesn't need to care about bluetooth earbuds, car stereos, cell phone speakers, boomboxes, and only marginally about DJs at dance parties. They can tune their mixing and mastering decisions to just the case of a hi-fi stereo setup with an enthusiast listening. They have to make fewer compromises because there are fewer cases to handle. The format enforces those constraints. You can't just ignore that.
> They can tune their mixing and mastering decisions to just the case of a hi-fi stereo setup with an enthusiast listening.
This is what audio purists should be asking for. Let's pay the creative production team to create and release a high-fidelity digital mix optimized for us. No concerns about radio play, boomboxes or loudness wars. Just their original creative intent.
If there's a "high bitrate" (24-bit, 96kHz FLAC or something like that) master, often enough that will be the case. You can reasonably assume that someone who's buying that version of the track has something capable of playing it back sanely. Same with the "high def audio" formats (SACD, there was another one...) - they often did, in fact, sound better. Not because of the high resolution, so much as because they were mastered to be listened to on a competent system, not on the subway on earbuds.
Nobody who is mastering records gives a damn about bluetooth boomboxes or phone speakers; and there is no way to optimize for a phone speaker and the "Maxell blown away" stereo setup.
