Why would that be do you suppose?
Why bass and not mid range or high frequencies?
Keith.
I think it has to do with the title of this thread and the way the
industry behaves.
They know they have to compress the digital product, so
they do.
They know they don't have to compress the LP as much, so
they don't. As a result, the LP has more impact, because as we all know, most of the energy in music is in the bass. If you are going to compress things,
the bass is 80% of what gets compressed.
If you think digital has better bass, the only reasonable explanation is that you simply don't listen to vinyl with gear at the same par as your digital rig.
It helps also to look at the equalization curve. During record, the preemphasis network is boosting the highs and rolling off bass on a 6DB per octave slope below the turnover frequency. This makes bass pretty easy to cut in the groove. Its the highs that are actually the harder thing to do. During playback, the bass rolloff helps the stylus as it does not have to move as much. A 6 db slope in mechanical terms is profound, as it means the stylus might be moving only 1/4 or 1/8th or less of what it might have done otherwise, depending on frequency.
I find that if I encounter breakup problems on an LP, its far more likely to be occurring at high frequencies rather than bass frequencies. I think most people have experienced this but they don't think about the why/significance of it. One excellent and classic example: Garden of Wurm on the Wake of Poseidon by King Crimson. If the LP has tracking damage, it will show up on this track. What distorts?? The Mellotron. Its not playing any bass at all. But its pretty intense. OTOH, the same damaged LP (which has good bass impact on the title track), will have no breakup. I can give plenty of other examples, and I am sure others can too.
The bottom line is bass is far more likely to be better on an LP than the same thing on CD. The caveat comes in when the same source and compression is used for both media- then they tend to be the same. I have a few LPs where that is obviously the case, notably, the reissue of Porcupine Tree's Voyage 34, which is lame compared to the original.
I like all sorts of music. In the old days, on our website we used to have a page called 'the Bass of the Year Award' which was simply a list of the recordings we were playing as reference to see how the bottom end was doing. The recordings were all over the map: Zoon by Fields of Nephilm (LP), The Thin Red Line (CD only), Early Man by Steve Roach (CD only), 1492 soundtrack by Vangelis (LP)... Of course I have recordings that we have released on LP and CD as well, one is Canto General, which when recorded featured the largest bass drum in the state (I insisted on it with the producer).
Now when you produce an LP or CD, one thing you have at your disposal is the master file or tape. In the case of Canto, I also have the tape machine that made the recording. I know exactly how that recording is supposed to sound; I spent a week setting up the recording rig and experimenting while the ensemble rehearsed in the actual space. When you have that kind of experience, you have a real reference. Anyone here that runs a label and has released both LP and CD knows what I am talking about.