Vinyl vs CD

CD version. Click for a bigger picture

Vinyl version. Click for a bigger picture

So, basically what you see here is the same songs. It's the movie soundtrack to Inception by Hans Zimmer. Very very good soundtrack and it's my favorite one. Very good audio quality and very good music, extremely well done all of it and I can strongly recommend it.

Back to the topic. The upper picture is a MasVis analysis of the CD version. As you can see it still has pretty good dynamic range but brickwall limiting exists at a couple of places, unfortunately. The lower picture is the same kind of analysis of the vinyl version. Here you see far better dynamic range and zero brickwall limiting. The only downside with the vinyl rip is the crackling and static noise that typically occurs on vinyl.

Another example of this is the album Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites (2010) by Skrillex. Unfortunately I don't have both versions available at the moment but I remember seeing lots of brickwall limiting on the CD version while the vinyl version had none of it and sounded clearly better, even though it had some static noise and crackling as per usual.