3 Feb
2015
3 Feb
'15
12:09 a.m.
Atte <atte(a)youmail.dk> writes:
I had a fairly unpleasant experience last weekend. A
band (indie/folk)
in which I play and for whom I also did/does some recordings + mixes
for, were played on national danish radio on the national chart. The
unpleasant part was that our song sounded really wimpy compared to the
other tracks. I recorded the whole stream and imported it in software to
investigate. It turned out that most of the wimpy-ness comes from us
being much lower (same peak levels, but not so heavily compressed) than
the other tracks.
So in theory or utopia, we should refrain from compressing our audio so
hard. But in reality, the loudness war is lost.
NB: This weekend were our third week on the chart. Now I squashed our
master accordingly and send it to them to play instead of the old, wimpy
one, should we be fortunate enough to still be on the list next week...
A certain amount of compression is nice to make everything sound big,
but when it gets to the point that everything in the mix is exactly the
same loud volume, it's just gone too far.
Go ahead and compress though, certainly!
--
+ Brent A. Busby + "We've all heard that a million monkeys
+ Sr. UNIX Systems Admin + banging on a million typewriters will
+ University of Chicago + eventually reproduce the entire works of
+ James Franck Institute + Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet,
+ Materials Research Ctr + we know this is not true." -Robert Wilensky