Compression Demo

[MidnightSensi]

I was building some drumbeats and thought of this after seeing the Metallica thread.

I rendered three samples. The first one has no compression, the second one has a bit of compression, and the last one has a fair amount. You'll be able to see what you are hearing:

No Compression

A bit of Compression

More Compression

 

[avaserfi]

The file links don't seem to work.

Aside from that I think it is important to note that there actually is a difference between dynamic compression alone and the likely resulting distortion created. From what I can tell these files are examples of the dynamicly compressed with resulting distortion. This is what is likely to be found in many commercial recording that are effected by the loudness wars. If you are curious about visualizing and hearing the effects of dynamic compression there is information about this here. The sample files are found about 1/3 of the way down the page below the image of the uncompressed and compressed versions.

 

[Adam]

The file links don't seem to work.

Same for my browser. However, I was able to go to the root directory for those files here and then just select the file name to have them play.

 

[Sheep]

Good stuff Avaserfi.

There is a program called Audacity that you can load songs into and see how compressed they are. Quite handy if you're unfamiliar with the difference in Compressed and Uncompressed audio.

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

SheepStar

 

[MidnightSensi]

Bah, thanks, I wish I could edit

No Compression

A bit...

really

 

[Djizasse]

Good article. Simple and short.

This last paragraph says it all:

younger generations listen on the go: in the car, walking around with a mp3 player or as background music. None of these situations are conducive to large dynamics as such noisy environments would make the subtly of dynamics too quite and the loud parts overwhelming relative to the average

They should release double sided CDs, like they did with vynil.
They don't even have to think about what to label them, just use the good old "A" and "B".

(A for Audioholics, B for... Bose?)

 

[ErinH]

You'll be able to see what you are hearing

I somewhat disagree with being able to hear what you see...

If you compare 24bit tracks to 16bit tracks you can see the difference, but I’ve yet to meet someone who could REALLY hear a difference.

In fact, I’d be surprised if most people can hear the difference b/t 320 & wav. I know I have a very hard time, especially varying from genre to genre and system to system.


I’ll try to add some of my scans later if I can find the posts I made on another forum.