the actual mastering quality seems to make the biggest difference once a digital CD quality file level is reached.
Dat’s true, dat! As I’ve said before, back in the days of vinyl, the quality of a vinyl release could change over the course of the first year of release; for example Dire Straits ‘Love Over Gold’ was mastered by Bob Ludwig at Masterdisk, and the first pressings were made from stampers from Masterdisk, but over time damage and wear happens, so replacements need to be sourced, and it’s not feasible to get them from Masterdisk, so stereo copies of the original studio master tapes were sent out, and new masters were cut by local mastering studios, so already there’s a copy of a copy being used, so degradation is taking place, before you even take into account the mastering engineer may well not be as good as Ludwig was.
CD’s were worse, they were originally mastered from stereo master tapes EQ’d from vinyl, which has a completely different dynamic range, before you get into the whole shitfest that’s known as ‘the Loudness Wars’, where the record companies mantra was literally ‘everything louder than everything else’, Oasis’ ‘What’s The Story (Morning Glory)’, and Metallica’s ‘Death Magnetic’ being almost the definition of the process.
https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/dynamic-range-loudness-war
