Loudness Wars again

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Just to show how it SHOULD be done, here's two outputs from Keith Howard's excellent Music Dynamics Analysis software. Two songs with similar instrumentation (male vocal, acoustic guitar). One is a commercial release, one is home-made. Which do you think sounds "better"? Which do you think sounds more "real"?
 

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Headroom for sure, but a wide range of levels- that's dynamics. Significant tails toward the low side as well- maybe the "microdynamics" or "downward dynamic range" so beloved of audio reviewers?

It would never sell. Too natural. It just sounds like a guy playing a Yamaha guitar and singing from a normal perspective.
 
A good mix needs very little mastering. And many confuse the two. As sy says real dosnt sell well. Think about a live acoustic performance. Every seat in the house has a different mix. ( direction of the instrument and distance will change the tone and level of each instrument ). And that mix will change when the instrument moves. Listen to a trumpet as it swings 90degrees to face you. Now it's way too loud in the mix. Musicians adjust there levels to mix themselves. If the trumpet player can't hear the piano he won't play as loud even if the audience can't hear the trumpet. This is totayl dependent on how well they hear each other which has so many factors, from room acoustics to instruments to musicians personalities. What the audience hears and what the musicians hear is different, so again the mix is variable. And if you want real youll need to hear the people beside you and the air conditioning and sometimes even traffic and airplanes.
 
Also compression and limiting are not the same. Compression is too slow for loudness wars. It let's the peaks thru and if used correctly helps even levels, and is best used on individual instruments or voices. ( some singers can hav a 20 db dynamic between soft and loud and nobody likes a disappearing vocal, some bass E strings are 10 db hotter than the D and would clipp the whole mix.) limiting started as just removing the fast peaks and was an automatic consequence of recording to tape. (Some engineers still like recording drums to tape because of this). The loudness wars have probably been around almost as long as transistor radios and started with producers paying DJs to turn up the volume on there songs. When this became illegal they looked for electronic ways to do this and started with compressors and where able to increase there "volume" a few db. As limiters became better, producers started using them to increase the average level more and more till recordings that have 3 db dynamic range are the norm.
 
Acknowledging this is a four year old thread....
Last I saw most commercial stations were running Optimod-FM processors. But the most pleasing compressor to the ear (assuming you are stuck having to compress) was a DIY op-amp circuit with gain controlled by an LDR in the feedback path coupled to a second op-amp driving a tiny lamp. Louder equaled brighter lamp equaled less gain.

Doc
 
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