"Serge Auckland" wrote in message
...
Here in Ohio wrote:
On Tue, 7 Nov 2006 08:38:21 -0500, "Arny Krueger"
wrote:


is less than that of wide dynamic range music. Thing is that even the LP
format didn't need hypercompression.

Unless you are Todd Rundgren. He seemed to be doing everything he
could to make a lousy medium even worse. :-)

The reason that so much music is hypercompressed today is because people
no longer predominately listen to music as their sole activity. Music is
more likely than ever to be listened to while the listener is doing
something else that is more important to them. Therefore, dynamic range
is a detriment to many listener's use of music.


I don't think the record companies have thought it out that well. We can
also look at radio as an example of something that people often
listen to in the background. Radio is compressed (for transmitter
efficiency if nothing else), but it isn't always hypercompressed.

No, not always, but here in the UK and in France, stations compress to
eliminate any dynamic range. As I mentioned before, there was a well known
station Chief Engineer who bragged his processor was so wound up he got
less than 1dB dynamic range. His station of course sounded as you would
expect, but he was happy.

What I have read is that this is an extension of the "I want it to be
loud and stand out" thing that some of the record companies execs
push. They think that boosting the average volume level will sell more
records than actually allowing for fidelity would. (Or something like
that. Some of the record company people I met in the past were just
nuts. There was one guy that looked for new talent in my area that
liked being paid in one dollar bills. He said he just liked to spread
them out and lay on them.)

The articles on this do mention that the average level is almost at
the max level for CD. If they were simply compressing it for
background use, they wouldn't have to push the level so high.

That's what makes it so incomprehensible. With the 20dB or less dynamic
range of many pop CDs, and a theoretical 96dB dynamic range of the CD
medium, you would think they could find 20 dB's space in that without
having to exceed 0dBFS. What's a volume control for......



You'll be interested to know that this month's copy of Computer Music
magazine has a 5 page article on compression (and limiting) techniques where
you will find the phrases 'All record companies want their records to sound
louder than everyone else's...' and 'It might look cool but, sadly, the VU
meter has no place on modern studios...''

(What I object to is the use of the word 'record' to mean a CD or, worse, a
'virtual track'....)