Oh hell yes!!! You would not believe the crap we do to finals with hard limiting all before that all during recording. Certainly during the mastering stage. It's completely necessary too in the vast majority of cases. yes I am saying that you are going to be hard pressed to find anything that is not compressed. And we even did it before there were a lot of good compressors. We made notes and rode the gain during the mix! Sometimes it took several engineers to make all the moves. Yes, that too was compression.
Here is what would really happen were it not for compression: You would crank up the volume at the beginning of a tune to what you thought was an acceptable level then...............blam.....one errant peak...Goodbye tweeters to say the least.
Most do not have a clue about the awesome and I do mean awesome DR that is available to them with merely 16 bits of dynamic range. 24 bits???? OMG! I'm not even going to make this a lecture on logarithms read Klipsch Toole etc. Some of us dear audiophiles including myself who started recording and mixing with the very limited dynamic range of vinyl as a final product had no clue what could happen, hell regarding even tape: We used to blow up our tweeters on a regular basis merely fast forwarding the tape after the big Crowns became financially available, and I am not that old, in my 50's actually, I started this pretty young. 99% of all the speakers in the world would be in shreds if we didn't aggressively compress and limit. FYI, for those who can put this all together. 16 bits: over 64 thousand levels available. 24 bits? Well over 16 MILLION!!!! If we didn't limit dynamic range in the studio no one would ever ever keep a speaker intact.
Pop music without compression? Even close mic'ed acoustic music without compression..... Oh the humanity! Were this practice to start this without a wall to wall information campaign? There would simply be very few small speakers left completely intact within months. Those large amps required to keep them listenable would blow the voice coils into the poor audiophile's laps and kill half the cats on the globe!!!!!
It truly is this drastic compression alone that makes small speakers feasible. Embrace compression audiophiles, it may save your cat's life.
Here is what would really happen were it not for compression: You would crank up the volume at the beginning of a tune to what you thought was an acceptable level then...............blam.....one errant peak...Goodbye tweeters to say the least.
Most do not have a clue about the awesome and I do mean awesome DR that is available to them with merely 16 bits of dynamic range. 24 bits???? OMG! I'm not even going to make this a lecture on logarithms read Klipsch Toole etc. Some of us dear audiophiles including myself who started recording and mixing with the very limited dynamic range of vinyl as a final product had no clue what could happen, hell regarding even tape: We used to blow up our tweeters on a regular basis merely fast forwarding the tape after the big Crowns became financially available, and I am not that old, in my 50's actually, I started this pretty young. 99% of all the speakers in the world would be in shreds if we didn't aggressively compress and limit. FYI, for those who can put this all together. 16 bits: over 64 thousand levels available. 24 bits? Well over 16 MILLION!!!! If we didn't limit dynamic range in the studio no one would ever ever keep a speaker intact.
Pop music without compression? Even close mic'ed acoustic music without compression..... Oh the humanity! Were this practice to start this without a wall to wall information campaign? There would simply be very few small speakers left completely intact within months. Those large amps required to keep them listenable would blow the voice coils into the poor audiophile's laps and kill half the cats on the globe!!!!!
It truly is this drastic compression alone that makes small speakers feasible. Embrace compression audiophiles, it may save your cat's life.
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The first thing that a lot of people hear differently when I play their mixes over horns is the reverb timing details. I don't quite understand this but I credit a lot of what I learned some time ago regarding reverb timing, pre delay etc, to hearing mixes over horn speakers. And this was in fact, with a simple AV receiver amps of some sort or other. Nothing fancy at all, most likely is way the dynamic range of big horns really hearing for the first time.
We are not sure there is such a thing as golden ears. Part of the exercise is to discover if there is and if there is, what it is and who has it.
Cheers
Ian
Surely, experience is the same as research, just poorly expressed?I'm afraid experience trumps theory, research every time - in my book ...
Cheers
Ian
Seeing how virtually the whole of human history we have relied totally on such, and, society has managed to survive and get somewhere, including where we are now, using such - indicates that it's not totally disposable,
Seems to me that all the **** in the world today and the past has been caused by it. Wars, religion, genocide, economic collapse , all based on the 'experience' mantra. In truth the only real progress and improvement in living standards has been made by objective research.
Cheers
Ian
It would be good if we could work towards a basic definition. It seems to me to be the ability to audibly discern things that others cannot. I think we need to separate it from the 'golden ears' that are obtained by training that anyone could undertake and tease out the aspects that are inherent in some individuals that no amount of training can reproduce in ordinary mortals. I postulated perfect pitch might be one. The ability to detect very small changes in frequency response might be another.
Cheers
Ian
Are you aware of Fletcher Munson curves???
Fletcher?Munson curves - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cheers
Ian
We all understand that some compression is needed. Drastic compression is not; it is an abomination. If people want to use tiny speaker at loud volumes in quiet passages then their own equipment should do the required compression in loud passages. The rest of us with slightly larger speakers and slightly less deaf ears can then enjoy the music with something more like the proper dynamic range.peteleoni said:
There is to my ears also a distinct difference between analogue-style compression be it tape compression from going in hot, hardware compressors and emulated hardware comps via plug ins and digital compression hitting 0dBFS.
Hitting 0dBFS is very much like ss amp clipping in that it inserts a small (or not so small) slice of white noise. At least that is what it sounds like to me.
A clipping tube amp sounds more like the aforementioned analogue compression types.
Hitting 0dBFS is very much like ss amp clipping in that it inserts a small (or not so small) slice of white noise. At least that is what it sounds like to me.
A clipping tube amp sounds more like the aforementioned analogue compression types.
I wouldn't mind a dollar for every time that's thrown into the mix ...
If a real piano is playing at a distance, and you walk towards it, there is certain subjective experience for your hearing as you do so. And it should be the same when the volume is raised in an audio system, of a piano playing. Typically this is not the case, the system distorts, 'compresses', and that's the sort of tonal change I'm talking about ...
No, it's more than that - with the real thing a subjective quality which I call 'intensity' builds up, the sound of the piano seems to fill the listening space in which you're in. Most systems can't or don't reproduce this quality, there's a 'smallness' to the sound of that instrument - when you experience a system capable of generating the 'correct' impact of the piano at realistic volumes then you appreciate how deficient the normal audio setup is at doing the job ...
Well, I've already described the steps taken for the Aldi, which were relatively straighforward - and encouraged others to try something similar for themselves - but as yet have received no feedback. So, it might work for others, or it might not ... you can lead a horse to water but ...
Each improvement in itself is not so special, I've already mentioned the nature of them, many times - they merely repeat what many others do, at various times. The key is, that you have to do all of them - doing only some of them, or doing it in a half-hearted way, will probably not make enough of a difference.
Think of it like this: you want a plane to fly, not crash into the barrier at the end of the runway when trying to take off ... do you make sure all the systems on the plane are working properly, or just those that are convenient to check, adopt the 'near enough is good enough' attitude ...
Each improvement in itself is not so special, I've already mentioned the nature of them, many times - they merely repeat what many others do, at various times. The key is, that you have to do all of them - doing only some of them, or doing it in a half-hearted way, will probably not make enough of a difference.
Think of it like this: you want a plane to fly, not crash into the barrier at the end of the runway when trying to take off ... do you make sure all the systems on the plane are working properly, or just those that are convenient to check, adopt the 'near enough is good enough' attitude ...
Frank, with a delta sigma DAC the piano often sounds very bad. I expect it is just easier to hear the artifacts when a piano are used due to the broad frequency spectrum and the harmonic structure it have.
I wouldn't mind a dollar for every time that's thrown into the mix ...
If a real piano is playing at a distance, and you walk towards it, there is certain subjective experience for your hearing as you do so. And it should be the same when the volume is raised in an audio system, of a piano playing. Typically this is not the case, the system distorts, 'compresses', and that's the sort of tonal change I'm talking about ...
No, the two are not equivalent. When you walk towards a piano, the acoustic and the stereo image changes as well as the level reaching your ears. That is nothing like the same as simply raising the volume.
Cheers
Ian
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