| I can offer this on Radio & TV mixes...our agency produces about a hundred spots per month, which are all sent out digitally to stations all over the country.
Most of the TV is Fast Channel delivery and radio is MP3 via email. Our TV spots go with a -10 to meet Fast Channel's requirements. Radio spots are mixed at the hottest level the mixer will allow, peaking at about +4. Plus we run the final mix thru a maximizer to get it as hot as possible. BTW: some radio stations have a 2mb limit on audio deliveries so we have to keep the rate at around 128. We have one station in smalltown Okla that has a 1mb limit, which requires the spot to be converted at a much lower rate...go figure...audio is their business and they prefer the worst quality they can live with just because they won't beef up their server....anyway....Once the radio spots get to the stations they are usally limited/compressed at least twice before they get to the transmitter. In the case of the last Clearchannel station I worked at we used an Optimod in the master engineering bay, plus the production studios had L/C's for processing all spots. So it got smashed twice before getting up the stick. There are some stations that use a final L/C at the transmitter too, which would process the audio 3 times before it gets to your radio...so it's important to produce at the agency level with as little L/C'ing as possible, otherewise, by the time it gets on the air, it's been squashed into oblivion...Fuel for thought....now you know why the music on FM radio sounds so horrible... |