Compression and radio broadcasting

[sm80808]

When broadcast on the radio, and going through compression at the station, will a highly compressed track sound louder as one that has less compression at the source or will they sound about the same?

[jordanstoner]

There's a really good article on just this question:
http://www.omniaaudio.com/tech/mastering.htm

Also, check out:
http://www.mindspring.com/~mrichter/...s/dynamics.htm

Standard FM Radio Compression

http://www.orban.com/support/orban/t..._Truth_1.3.pdf

[jordanstoner]

[with a non-squashed source after radio compression]... The result will be just as loud on-air as hypercompressed material, but will have far more punch, clarity, and life.

Bottom line - the more compression your source track has, generally the worse it will translate on the radio. There will be no "improvement" to "perceived loudness" after a certain point, and you'll lose a lot more detail with a more compressed source track.

Hope this helps!

[jamsmith]

Thats why I have always scratched my head about doing a "radio mix" with all the extra compression. All the pop and rock stations I hear use an amazing amount of compression with a very slow release time. Yechh! I guess I am big fan of dynamics and would never compress my track. I do some peak limiting and the normalize, but thats it. I always like the way my stuff sound over the radio compared to stuff that was mastered for it.

My be fun to experiment with an expander on your mix to try to compensate for the radio station compressor

Since I am not in the Mastering forum where I am more liable to be pounced on, let me take this time to say I believe compression in music is not really natural, but sounds that way because we are conditioned to hear it. Compression was used for 2 purposes 1) to be sure the radio station's carrier wave isn't over modulated (FCC regulations), and 2) to be make sure the source material fit within the limitation of the phonograph record. I believe that even some of the EQ curves we are used to hearing was the result of making a good groove to ensure proper tracking. (You do know thats why the bass is always in the middle.) A CD player is going to have 90dB or more of dynamic range. Why not use it?

[jordanstoner]

I believe compression in music is not really natural, but sounds that way because we are conditioned to hear it.

Could you explain what you mean by this?

[7rojo7]

A t the transmitter they also do Phase rotation to ensure maximum output

[tINY]

Originally Posted by jamsmith

A CD player is going to have 90dB or more of dynamic range. Why not use it?

Because by the time it gets ripped to MP3 and played through cheap earbuds at the skatepark, 30dB dynamic range is pushing it if you want the punk kid to hear the music....


-tINY

[jamsmith]

Originally Posted by jordanstoner

Could you explain what you mean by this?

Well, I thought I did!

I read many years ago that when Hendrix played the BBC, the engineers went wild because the couldn't undestand why they were hearing so much distorition even though none of the meters were peaking. Electronic distortion is not a natural phenomenon, but we all grew up with it and it sounds as natural to us as a violin. I think that if you went back 75 years an played music with the squash it has today, those people would find it most disconcertingly wrong to their ears. A lot of people who don't like rock music cite lack of dynamics as their main complaint. Well, distortion is clipping, which radio people call hard limiting - a form of compression. You really do have little dynamic range.

[jamsmith]

Originally Posted by tINY

Because by the time it gets ripped to MP3 and played through cheap earbuds at the skatepark, 30dB dynamic range is pushing it if you want the punk kid to hear the music....


-tINY

Well, then let them buiding 3:1 compression into the ripper code and let the music breath for the rest of us. Really, they do mastering for every other format vinyl, cassette, CD, radio, they should master for MP3. If we all switched to a denser format like DVD for all music, we could provide all those levels of compression and let the listener decide.

[jordanstoner]

Ah. Well, compression via mastering and mixing isn't natural - that's just a fact of life. It's a tool just like everything else. I just read more into your post than what you were actually saying. Sorry 'bout that.

OT: Electronic compression is not a natural process, this we all know. However, our ears do have a natural compression system built in to protect us from overly loud sounds which might damage our hearing. It could be theorized that the reason music was ever overly compressed in the first place (meaning above and beyond the technical reasons that radio must be compressed, or compression for the reasons of cutting to vinyl) was that loud sounds grab our attention.

Someone figured out that a song that is perceived as being louder than others is the psychoacoustic equivalent of a gunshot amid the normal sounds of our immediate environment. It triggers a defensive mechanism in our brain that forces louder sounds to move immediately into our focus. We find them exciting and interesting for their duration because they elicit an instinctive response and make us concentrate on them. However, once it has been analyzed by our brain as something non-threatening, then the interest fades.

In today's world of the "loudness wars" (appropriately named, because wars are really loud), there is no perceived loudness threshold to cross to grab the listener's attention - it's just a constant stream of very loud noise which we grow used to and treat as background noise. The original purposes have defeated themselves, as there is no longer a possibility of being "louder" than the rest of the music on the radio - and now we hear things that are squashed just to fit in a competative space.

However, great music that has been mastered greatly is still appealing - moreso than ever. Hearing Comfortably Numb after to the latest Blink 182 or System of a Down track is like a breath of fresh air, and is immanently more interesting than the assault of audio that it's sandwiched between. I think (and hope and pray) we'll start seeing a trend of "sans squash" in the near future, for the same reasons that music started to be heavily limited in the first place. The dynamic range of audio will become more interesting than the perceived loudness, and the concentration required to hear things you didn't hear on the first listen will become the motivation for a renaissance of sorts.

I mean, I still listen to The Wall or Aenima or Disco Volante and hear something I didn't hear before - and that is what excites me and makes me want to listen to the music again and again. I don't get tired of it because it holds secrets - little treasures - that are infinitely more entertaining than a piece that has lost all of its detail to over compression. Subtlety is key - I like music with a good poker face.

Anyway, enough of this off-topic word vomit from me. To answer the original question - Heavily compress and limit your music to sound like everything else out there, or don't to be unique and interesting. Good luck - and Viva la Resistance!