Personally, it's unfortunate that the article/example only deals with the "Loudness Wars" on the albums. Nothing about what compression does. If you read through the postings at the bottom of it you see some very interesting ideas. My favorite is the what a poster wrote about compression of audio and what it does:
""Compressing" reduces the loudest sounds AND boosts the quietest ones - it compresses the dynamic range (the difference between the lowest and highest decibel values). Think of it as flattening the slope of the curve, if you will. Compression was a necessary evil back in the age of tiny transistor radios: otherwise you wouldn't hear the quiet stuff and the loud stuff would distort. Now, what joe described on June 6 - just reducing the loudest sounds - is called "limiting". All digital recording requires severe limiting, because it can handle only up to a certain numerical value for volume."
Apparently mp3s (compression) only change the dynamic range...ummm, and this is why the recording industry gets away with the dumbing of audio, because of mis-information.
My wife constantly complains about me listening to classical
because of the dynamic range. She yells at me to turn it down because she thinks I've turned it up when it's just the dynamics of the performance coming through. No single decibel level for the entire performance...
An additional
article on the recording industry's destruction of audio.
Anyone interested in finding out how much Prince's music is clipped? I don't fully understand how to graph it and find the actual peaks. I always have a hard time listening to more than one or two tracks of his music. And NO, it's not because his music is "bad." I happen to like his stuff. Very innovative.
-pat
