And the winner is: Compact disc release. This is a really great album, certainly worthy of purchase on any format. And let me start out by saying that this is a really good sounding LP release, from a mastering perspective anyway (I'll give my thoughts on the sound of the mix shortly). The vinyl version appears at first glance to have clearly better dynamics compared to the CD, but how much of this is due to the physical properties of the LP format versus possible lesser compression being applied compared to the digital release is debatable. Some may in fact argue that these added dynamics don't represent "real" musical information, but are merely a result of the idiosyncracies inherent in the vinyl format. Due to physics, the sound quality on any vinyl disc gradually worsens as the stylus gets closer to the center, with high frequencies suffering the most noticeable drop off. This is unfortunately very apparent at the end of a song like "Let the Flames Begin," which ends side one of the vinyl release. The CD version is unquestionably the superior sounding one here, as during the LP playback all the sounds in the mix begin to mesh together into a bit of a mess due to the significant drop off in high frequency response and the continually slowing speed of the stylus tracking the groove. This is an unavoidable side effect of the format and it's particularly egregious with loud, dense music. It's likely that lesser compression was applied in order to keep the disc more playable, as cutting a record that's too loud risks causing the playback needle to skip out of the groove. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, the vinyl is a solid sounding release, and should be more than satisfactory for most listeners.

So, on to the sound of the album itself. I am most definitely not a fan of the mixing and production practices for most popular music today, which seem designed to pull us kicking and screaming farther and farther down the path of the artificial and the artificially perfect, and away from the natural, nuanced performances of the past. I'm speaking in particular of the application of autotune, quantization, sample replacement, and teams of songwriters churning out cookie cutter product over and over again. The latter can of course be recognized as something that has been a part of the industry for decades, but the former three are very much real and very much a problem. Aligning everything perfectly to a grid using programs such as Cakewalk and ProTools eliminates any feeling of natural "groove" that comes from having human players with human imperfections, instead forcing an artificially perfect tempo that will sound soulless when compared to an actual live performance. Autotune, originally intended for the correction of minor vocal errors, is now utilized as an effect in and of itself, drenchingly applied to pop recordings as a cheesy effect that makes vocal performances sound robotic and unnatural, exacerbated by the tendency of some recording engineers to encourage performers to sing "flat" in the studio because very dynamic, emotional performances are difficult to autotune in the same way that reverb is hard to compress. As a former drummer, I find sample replacement in particular to be extremely egregious. In my opionion, if the drums are recorded but then replaced by samples, you no longer have a recording of that drummer. And unfortunately, all of these have become extremely common on popular recordings to the point that we're now seeing them even in genres that had formerly resisted computerization such as heavy metal. I can hear the difference between natural drums and sample replaced ones, and it doesn't even require a trained ear, it just requires someone who's listened to a lot of recordings of real players over time. The drum sound on Riot! is abysmal. The application of a proper drum track - with snare dynamics fully intact instead of compressed absolutely to hell - would go a long way toward making this album less tiring to listen to repeatedly. If this had been released in 1995, it would have sounded incredible, with amazing feel and punchiness due to the lack of all the things I've railed about above. Thankfully, Hayley Williams' vocals were spared being smothered in autotune, and the music on offer is of such quality that they make the final album still worthy of praise in spite of the production defects.