"Peter" wrote in message
om
"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
You've not really thought this through. If everything was the same
level, there'd be no dynamic range.

If you're that worried about waking kids, use headphones.

Hmmm... me and the wife both wearing headphones... it's a thought, but
it might make "pass the biccies dear" a bit difficult.

I don't want to cut out the dynamic range altogether, but what I want
to do is automate what I do already i.e. turn the volume down for the
fights / arguments / car chases and turn it up again for the bit where
Hercule Poirot gathers all the usual suspects together in the drawing
room and explains (quietly) why he thinks Miss Scarlett did it with
the lead piping.

A good inexpensive hardware tool for managing dynamic range that I've had
some experience is the Behringer 1424. I'm using it to front-end a cassette
machine that is being used for recording church services. It has four major
functions - a compressor with peak limiter, a noise gate, a sonic enhancer,
and a stereo enhancer. I have the last two functions completely turned off.

You can control the various functions independently with a dial and LED
display. You can have it memorize up to about 100 different sets of
parameters, and call them back by number.

The compressor can be adjusted to increase the level of soft passages by a
variable amount. You can set it to act slow or fast. Slow action tends to be
less intrusive. The limiter can be adjusted to sharply decrease further
level increases beyond a certain upper ceiling that you choose. The noise
gate provides a means to avoid further amplifying sounds that are already
very low, such as background noise. You get to choose how low.

The compressor and the noise gate work well together, because left to its
own devices the compressor would bring the noise floor up to the point where
it would be intrusive.

Finally, the whole box is stereo and split-spectrum. It acts on the 2
channels separately or with the dynamics processing for each channel tied
together. It acts on high frequency sounds and low frequency sounds
separately, which tends to minimize the extent to which low frequency sounds
modulate high frequency sounds. You can pick the point where the frequencies
are separated.