On Wednesday 14 April 2004 13:50, Andrew Gaydenko wrote: You could try anti-compressing music but It doesn't do you any good. The only effect is that you have to turn you amp up for the solo of the violine and then get angry neighbours when the rest of the orchestra comes back... Turning the volume of an instrument up via compressor is not the same as playing the instrument louder as the compressor doesn't change the sound of the instrument which is most of the time your distinction between loud and quiet sounds/instrument-playing. The quality of the music is raising with the compressor... Arnold -- Get my public-key from pgp.mit.edu or pgp.uni-mainz.de --- Hi, I am a .signature virus. Please copy me into your ~/.signature and send me to all your contacts. After a month or so log in as root and do a rm / -rf. Or ask your administrator to do so...

Andrew Gaydenko wrote: Well, nearly all music is compressed a bit, but I often do my own with no compression. It's really a question of how loud I want to listen and how much headroom my stereo has. I don't listen much about 80-85db average volume, and I have LOTS of headroom in my system electrically, so for me it works well. Unfortunately, for analog radio and TV, where they have much lower signal to noise ratios, they have to compress. It's an unfortunate, but common, problem that Ron was running into. So many producer types think you have to get a CD 'radio ready'. In truth most radio stations have big, fat compressors anyway, so it wouldn't matter much what CD they played. They will make sure they squash it down to whatever they need. 'Dark Side of the Moon' wasn't compressed much. It managed to get played. But of course, they weren't late-teen, belly-bareing, dance-music titans... (Hey, I like th ebare bellys though!) ;-) Basically, no, there's no way to get back to the original. It's not even about the compressor equations. Once data is compressed the dynamics that tell the compressor what to do are gone from the compressed data. To undo the compression you'd have to know something about the original dynamics. The data's not there, so you just cannot do it. Compression is not 'loss-less'. I.e. - what a compressor does to a 0.8v signal with slow dynamics is different than what it does to a signal that peaks at 0.8V with fast dynamics. since you don't know which one it was just by looking at the final bit stream you cannot get back to the original. If you're interested in about how engineers work and want more ideas, I cannot even begin to express how good Bob Katz's book on mastering audio is. Everyone interested in this subject should at least check it out form a library if not buy a copy. Probably one of the best $40 you'll ever spend on an audio book.