Gearslutz.com - View Single Post - beginners compression question (short and sweet)

Fredrik · 30th August 2005

1) Some compressors/limiters will have a automatic makeup gain and when you turn the threshold the apparent volume will rise, (for example the L1 limiter if you adjust the two faders simultaniously). Also found in some oldschool limiters for example where you raise the volume on the input and pushing the signal towards a cieling. Most of the times though its up to the user to adjust this, personally I think that if its apparent loudness that you are trying to achive it is easier to evalute the effect if you set the peaklevel to be the same in bypass as in operational mode.

2) a fast release means that the compressor will go out of compression as soon as the signal is below the threshold, sometimes this will be audiable and sound as though you were riding the fader up and down this effect can often be reduced by setting the releasetime longer witch will give a smoother sound.

If you set the releasetime to be so long that the next peak will arive before the compressor has recovered this will have the effect of not really using all the shown
gainreduction as compression. For example if your meter tells you that you have
5db of gain reduction then in this scenario when the peak is no longer present and the compressor goes out of action the meter might just be able to reach (say 2db) on the meter, now this means that you actually only has 3db of gain reduction, the other 2 db´s has the same effect as to turn down the output 2db.

30th August 2005	#2
Fredrik Lives for gear Joined: Jul 2005 Posts: 2,228	1) Some compressors/limiters will have a automatic makeup gain and when you turn the threshold the apparent volume will rise, (for example the L1 limiter if you adjust the two faders simultaniously). Also found in some oldschool limiters for example where you raise the volume on the input and pushing the signal towards a cieling. Most of the times though its up to the user to adjust this, personally I think that if its apparent loudness that you are trying to achive it is easier to evalute the effect if you set the peaklevel to be the same in bypass as in operational mode. 2) a fast release means that the compressor will go out of compression as soon as the signal is below the threshold, sometimes this will be audiable and sound as though you were riding the fader up and down this effect can often be reduced by setting the releasetime longer witch will give a smoother sound. If you set the releasetime to be so long that the next peak will arive before the compressor has recovered this will have the effect of not really using all the shown gainreduction as compression. For example if your meter tells you that you have 5db of gain reduction then in this scenario when the peak is no longer present and the compressor goes out of action the meter might just be able to reach (say 2db) on the meter, now this means that you actually only has 3db of gain reduction, the other 2 db´s has the same effect as to turn down the output 2db.