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In Reply to: RE: Depends on what they did posted by Bromo33333 on March 12, 2012 at 12:54:59
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
Follow Ups:
"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"
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