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In Reply to: RE: Telltale signs of compression? posted by Awacs on March 10, 2012 at 15:28:28
There's more than one way to do things at the production end of things.
Sometimes the whole recording is simply boosted in overall volume and anything over the maximum volume is hard clipped. These CDs can end up very in-your-face and harsh.
There is also a "compander" effect where there isn't necessarily a lot of clipping, but the soft parts are brought up in volume. This reduces they dynamic range. The result is the recording is more listenable as background music or in environments with competing noise (cars, etc.) but when listened to critically, the reduced dynamic range robs the recording of some of its life.
A lot of recordings are multi-tracked at the studio, with a separate channel for each instrument. Some instruments, such as drums, can have multiple tracks of their own. Modern studios make it pretty easy to compress or limit one track and not another, or to apply different amounts to different tracks.
Compression and limiting by a skilled engineer on a per-track basis who isn't being heavy-handed can be hard to spot.
I recall taking a look at a Lucinda Williams track a few years back and noticed the visual display indicated all of the drum strikes were all of absolutely uniform intensity. That's something that was impossible in the old analog days - one would see several dB difference between individual drum hits over the course of the passage.
Such uniformity can sound interesting at first, but it often robs the recording of its "human" qualities. Sometimes "perfect" isn't as musically interesting as "human".
In short, what to listen for depends on how they limited or compressed the recording. And it isn't necessarily bad. Rock 'n roll, for example, depends to some degree on compression. The problem is, in these days of the "loudness wars", that it is easy to go over-the-top and end up with a recording that is harsh and annoying.
Follow Ups:
I have a question:
Given the enormous dynamic range of actual live performances, the sensitivity of speakers recording microphones, and limitations of actual amplification - wouldn't compression of some kind be a necessary evil?
Isn't it a trade off?
"Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad"
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
"The reason for excessive compression is greed and ignorance."
I remember the old "Dyna flex" LP's ... awful, awful awful. MP3's sounded better. THink it has a similar root cause.
Agree that music loses something when compressed - but the "thwack" of a drum or some peaks are loud enough that I was wondering if a little compression would be "ok"
"Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad"
Do you mean "Dynagroove" which was a different process from Dyna Flex? I don't recall any Dyna Flex disks, but the Dynagrooves were horrible. Fortunately I only bought one with my own money.
It's OK to chop off one or two isolated peaks in a track if they are artifacts of multiple waves happening to roll in phase. (There are usually better ways of doing it than straight clipping.) If this is done with skill the result won't be audible and the rest of the track can be boosted. However, if the exact same processing is done repeatedly (e.g. on repeated drum hits) then the changes may be individually inaudible, but taking the track as a whole there will be degradation. It may manifest as a sense of unease or possibly as a conscious feeling that the recording is "unnatural".
Tony Lauck
"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar
nt
"Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad"
> > wouldn't compression of some kind be a necessary evil?
That's another "depends" - who's the artist, what's the genre, what musical instruments, what's the mix of acoustic vs amplified, and so on.
A small acoustic vocal or instrumental group may be fine with no limiting or compression at all. Perhaps even a classical orchestra, depending on the work they're playing and who's in charge of the ultimate sound quality.
However, throw in a drum kit with close miking and you may need some limiting to keep the odd drum strike from overloading things. Move that to a rock group with the lead singer swallowing his mike with a bunch of amplified instruments getting banged, and you'll probably need a lot more compression and limiting to get the "sound" the producer is after.
I don't think many knowledgeable people on the recording side would claim that no compression and no limiting are the only way to record. The problem is that for some outfits, it's simply become a race to see who can make their music the loudest. Unfortunately with CDs, they have a brick wall when it comes to how loud you can make a recording. That means you have to clip severely and compress the daylights out of the music to win that prize.
I've never quite figured out who that impresses and why, but it's sure not the way I like my recordings.
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