So this past week Megan got me a nice vinyl edition of Oasis' What's the Story Morning Glory. This is one of my favorite albums of all time, and is actually the first album I purchased with my own money back around 7th or 8th grade.
The vinyl copy is nicely done. Now, this album has historically been well known to be highly compressed. Personally I think it is representative as a product of its time where high compression and zero level metering became popular. Anyways, the album included the download of the Deluxe edition of the new re-mastered version of What's the Story Morning Glory. Upon initial listening I noticed that the album was quite a bit louder than the original that I ripped from my CD.
Out of curiosity I decided to load the audio files into Audacity for comparison and you can see how the new audio file is really normalized up to 0dB. Now I don't have the tools to truly analyze the audio, but it is interesting to take a quick look at the audio files and see how compressed both the audio files. At first glance I initially thought that the files were basically the same, with just one that was boosted. But upon a little closer inspection you can see that the waveforms are a bit different and there has been some "mastering" or EQ'ing on there. I noticed this most prominently on Champagne Supernova near the beginning where you can definitely see a difference.
