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RE: Depends on what they did

Today, recording technology can easily handle the dynamic range of uncompressed music. This hasn't been a problem for 50 years. Prior to that musicians made accommodation in their performance to the available technology. Playback technology can reproduce the full dynamic range of a symphony orchestra or other large musical ensemble, and the playback equipment need not be particularly costly unless the room is large (which probably implies an affluent consumer). A system with this capability need not cost more than a few thousand dollars. About the only technical reason for compression today is the desire for the music to be heard in specialized situations, e.g. as background music or in a noisy automobile. This is a pretty poor excuse for dumbing down music, especially since the technology exists today to inexpensively compress music during playback.

The reason for excessive compression is greed and ignorance. If one is marketing music to idiots who are unable to adjust a volume control then perhaps compression is appropriate. The present industry model for some musical genres assumes that the executives deciding on which music succeeds or fails commercially are idiots. But then most of the musicians playing in the hope of getting rich rather than out of love of music are probably idiots and their music probably deserves to be butchered.

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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