Craig Anderton piqued my curiosity in another thread about the difference in mixing for vinyl compared to mixing for CD.  I know vinyl is making a comeback, so I'm curious as to how many people here mix for vinyl these days.  And, for those who do mix for vinyl, how do you test your mixes?  I appreciate all who reply.

I don't know anything about it except a vague notion that it's advisable to have your bass frequencies centered.

... and compress it a lot more.

I know nothing.
 
Craig Anderton and others have talked about how different tracks on Vinyl have different fidelity. The tracks on the outside of the platter have more clear data. It makes sense if you think about it. The outer ring rotates faster. The speed of the disk doesn't change based on where the needle is on the platter.
 
I remember this moron who owned a new age label who thought there was something spiritual about the 7th track on a CD (1st track on the B-side). Haha.

You can't really discuss mixing for vinyl without mastering for vinyl, because a lot of the success of the mastering depends on the mixing. But there are several "rules"...
 
Always remember that mixing or mastering for vinyl has to accommodate the process of dragging a rock through yards of plastic to reproduce sound. And people think digital audio is unnatural...
 
There are physical limits to how well a stylus can follow a groove. Too loud a track will literally cause the needle to jump out of the groove.
 
The longer the side, the lower the level. This is why 12" singles were good for dance - you could have it louder than if you had a bunch of songs crammed into the same amount of space.
 
It was best to divide up the music so the length of the two sides was as close as possible.
 
The inner grooves distort more, although this also has to do with turntables. You'd often put your softest songs last on a side for this reason.
 
Vinyl has a hard time handling low frequencies. Kick and bass should always be mixed to center. The stylus doesn't know what to do if there are different, big excursions on opposite sides of the groove (assuming stereo, of course)
 
Few people today realize how drastically the pre-emphasis and de-emphasis curves affect the recording. On playback, the RIAA curve boosts the low frequencies by +20dB and cuts high frequencies by -20dB. That's a lot of highs going into the cutter when mastering during the pre-emphasis part. So you don't want to make things too bright, but because those frequencies are going to be amplified big-time. Most mastering cuts off frequencies below 40-50Hz and above 10-16kHz for this reason.
 
Vinyl has a limited dynamic range. If you want to stay above the noise and below distortion, some judicious limiting and compression is helpful.
 
If you're going to put out a vinyl release, you HAVE to use a pro mastering engineer who has experience with vinyl and with cutting lathes. You HAVE to get an acetate for approval to make sure things ended up okay. And if you're going to do the mix, the process is fraught with peril. Most mastering engineers can process a mix to be vinyl-friendly, but it helps a whole lot if the mix is vinyl-friendly in the first place.

Anderton
You can't really discuss mixing for vinyl without mastering for vinyl, because a lot of the success of the mastering depends on the mixing. But there are several "rules"...
 
*********EDIT*************
 
If you're going to put out a vinyl release, you HAVE to use a pro mastering engineer who has experience with vinyl and with cutting lathes. You HAVE to get an acetate for approval to make sure things ended up okay. And if you're going to do the mix, the process is fraught with peril. Most mastering engineers can process a mix to be vinyl-friendly, but it helps a whole lot if the mix is vinyl-friendly in the first place.

I had forgotten all that specialized stuff about mixing for vinyl, and good riddance as far as I'm concerned. But the last thing Craig says about using a professional mastering engineer if you're going to vinyl is right on. This is one area where you really need someone who's done it before, and in the Old Days I never tried to bypass that guy.
These days, though, I can't think of any audio reason why you'd want to make a vinyl record.

gswitz
The outer ring rotates faster. The speed of the disk doesn't change based on where the needle is on the platter.

Interesting. These 2 comments almost sound contradictory. It all depends on the mode of measurement.
 
If you measure by distance traveled, then the outer track travels faster than the inner track because it has to travel farther in the same amount of time to make each revolution.
 
If you measure by revolutions, the outer track travels the same speed as the inner track, but covers more ground.
 
Interestingly, the outer track should have higher resolution because it can contain more detail, data or information per second than the inner track. However, because it's a physical medium relying on friction to produce sound, the outer track will create more unwanted noise because there's more surface material being manipulated per second.
 
Those of you living near the equator are traveling about 1000 miles per hour while someone standing at one of the poles would take a whole day to simply turn 360 deg. in one place. Ecuadorians are literally living in the fast lane.
 
When you consider the fact that the earth goes around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour, our solar system whirls around the center of our galaxy at 490,000 miles per hour, and our galaxy is rushing towards a structure called the Great Attractor (a region of space roughly 150 million light-years away) at a speed of nearly 1,000 kilometers per second...... it's no wonder I'm always late for work!
 

I'm pretty sure the inner groove distortion is more a function of the turntable arm. That's why some companies produced linear tracking turntables where the stylus was exactly perpendicular to the record at all times.

That and the fact that the center hole is never perfectly center causing the disk to wobble as it rotates ensuring that the needle will never be perfectly aligned in the grove no matter where it rests.... not unlike our planet which also suffers (?) from rotational wobble and the ever shifting locations of the poles.
 
Linear TTs were mostly hype, I think, followed by "vertical" turntables....

 
And if you really want to do away with grove wear and needle misalignment:

http://eandt.theiet.org/magazine/2011/11/lasers-get-groovy.cfm

Those lazer turntables often get advertised as having 'CD Quality sound'. Hmmmmmm...