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It's pretty clear looking at that there's not a lot of bass energy. The noise floor is likely to be an issue too so the mastering has to take into account the amount of music they want to fit on per side and how far they are willing to go toward the label. If you go too far you'll end up with inner groove distortion.
As that album is 1hr14mins long it must be on 2 disks or cut very quietly. It doesn't make any difference that he recorded it quietly. Listening to the digital version they have taken time to preserve the dynamic range though which you'd expect from a guy who spent 2 years building his studio.
Personally I'd buy a title like this on CD rather than vinyl because there's a good chance that anything less than a lucky pressing would suffer from surface noise. I do have loads of LP's on vinyl I should have bought on CD though :)
Yet, regarding loud or less loud cuts I just got Nils Frahm's All Melody. It's beautiful.
He really geeked out at the Funkhaus in Berlin recording this album, and in the accompanying booklet he says To preserve its essence, this album has been carefully mixed and mastered at lower volume in order to keep all of its original dynamics - and indeed this is different from all the other albums I have, it also looks as if the groves are quite shallow.
Plus there is like a "step" or overlap on one of the tracks, haven't seen something like this before. You can't hear it though but it made me wonder what that is about..
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