Comments on Profile Post by luckybaer

I’m wondering if your chain is not good enough to expose any compression, does it mean you don’t know what you’re missing? That you’re probably better off with good enough gear?

The primary effect is that everything is always equally loud, which is just flat and boring. Overdoing compression for loudness can also lead to clipping, i. e. distortion.
Assuming you mean dynamic range compression, not lossy file size compression.

Personally, I don’t think that today’s pop productions are worse than those of the 80s, e.g., more the contrary. There were some really bad examples in the 90s with lots of clipping (they say at least), but there was never much dynamic range in this kind of music to begin with.

Comparing volume levelled mixes from the eighties and now, I often (not always!) prefer the newer ones (but for reasons that have nothing to do with DRC, like better ADC tech).

Music sounds very blah when it’s highly compressed. I think this is most of the reason why people tend to prefer vinyl over digital as the vinyl mix is almost always less compressed

@joch I think my chain is OK. I have a better idea of what compression is now - not just loud, but dull sounding, too.

It's also a loss of nuance, really. This is a really weird way to parse it I guess, but it's almost like not being able to find something you're looking for when it's right in front of your nose; you're just not expecting it to be so close so you literally overlook it.

And to my ears anyway, with my symphonic metal stuff (specifically Epica - The Phantom Agony): it's much harder to follow individual sonic elements e.g. vocals/instruments in more compressed releases, like they're buried deeper in Miscellaneous Noise^TM.

Compression artifacts and clipping are pretty obvious to me and unfortunately in 99% of new releases on popular music. Even a lot of reissues/remasters of great sounding old shit that was good when it was first issued. One of the major reasons I'll never stream. 75% at least of my listening is old shit pre 99

@HotRatSalad Yes. I am a control freak, so I can’t stream for fear of some ungodly loud shit making it to my ears.