Compression
No it's not another rant about lossy file-compression techniques.
It's real audio compression, the kind you do to lower the dynamic range of your source material. I prefer dbx by the way.
Listening the other day to one of my ambient creations(you'ld hardly call it a song) I realized something. The 'song' had extreme dynamic range and a vast sound-stage, afterwards I played one of my fave tracks from the Orbs Cydonia. It too is ambient, with a vast sound-stage. Yet my song sounded bigger than the Orbs lavish production. Why? Because compressed ambient music is so close to pointless as you'll ever get in sound. It defeats the purpose. It's nigh impossible to dream yourself away listening to all sounds played at the same volume. Now this might work for Britney Spears but I don't really dream myself away in Toxic.
Playing the Orbs older works reveal more primitive production but a far superior sound. Modern mastering I call the disease here and I wish all them idiots standing over the mastering engineer telling him to make it louder would just die. I wish technological evolution of the compressor would just stop("now we can squeeze out a whopping 24 dbs and noone can even hear it!" -yeah right).
I remember my first compressor fondly, working on analog 8-track my mastering chain would be -2-track -mixer -compressor -exciter -tape deck.
I used to knock off a whopping 3dbs in average, at ratios of 1:1.3 or so.
This made my tapes sound alot better.
Now I've stopped compressing my digital masters alltogether, I haven't heard one of them be improved in any way. Most of the time I can readily hear the blandness being introduced. This ofcourse puts me on odds with music industry, but I am not a part of it and I have no wish to be a part of it. I am much more of a sound designer than I am a pop producer. If I were to work in the industry I would be doing something like foley on movies(then again, Norway doesn't have a movie-industry).
Meanwhile, I plunder on with me own things and the only place I know of where I can hear some hifi these days is my own studio playing my own music, or records that are more than 15 years old, or anything made without pro-tools.
Having heard so many records made on pro-tools I have grown accustomed to it's sound even though I have never used it. It sucks. Sorry guys, you can't keep on using that if you want to make good sounding records.
b
It's real audio compression, the kind you do to lower the dynamic range of your source material. I prefer dbx by the way.
Listening the other day to one of my ambient creations(you'ld hardly call it a song) I realized something. The 'song' had extreme dynamic range and a vast sound-stage, afterwards I played one of my fave tracks from the Orbs Cydonia. It too is ambient, with a vast sound-stage. Yet my song sounded bigger than the Orbs lavish production. Why? Because compressed ambient music is so close to pointless as you'll ever get in sound. It defeats the purpose. It's nigh impossible to dream yourself away listening to all sounds played at the same volume. Now this might work for Britney Spears but I don't really dream myself away in Toxic.
Playing the Orbs older works reveal more primitive production but a far superior sound. Modern mastering I call the disease here and I wish all them idiots standing over the mastering engineer telling him to make it louder would just die. I wish technological evolution of the compressor would just stop("now we can squeeze out a whopping 24 dbs and noone can even hear it!" -yeah right).
I remember my first compressor fondly, working on analog 8-track my mastering chain would be -2-track -mixer -compressor -exciter -tape deck.
I used to knock off a whopping 3dbs in average, at ratios of 1:1.3 or so.
This made my tapes sound alot better.
Now I've stopped compressing my digital masters alltogether, I haven't heard one of them be improved in any way. Most of the time I can readily hear the blandness being introduced. This ofcourse puts me on odds with music industry, but I am not a part of it and I have no wish to be a part of it. I am much more of a sound designer than I am a pop producer. If I were to work in the industry I would be doing something like foley on movies(then again, Norway doesn't have a movie-industry).
Meanwhile, I plunder on with me own things and the only place I know of where I can hear some hifi these days is my own studio playing my own music, or records that are more than 15 years old, or anything made without pro-tools.
Having heard so many records made on pro-tools I have grown accustomed to it's sound even though I have never used it. It sucks. Sorry guys, you can't keep on using that if you want to make good sounding records.
b
posted by bangskij at 15:56
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