"Telamon" wrote in message
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In article ,
"Brenda Ann" wrote:

"Telamon" wrote in message
...
In article ,
What a revelation coming from you that the music is compressed. I don't
think all stations do this to the extent that you supposedly do it.



The average station appears to compress everything to within a very small
dynamic range. Many as little as 6dB.

Wow, that's not much! I don't think I would want to listen to that. It
would wear me down in short order.


Most people don't even notice it, such is the way of today's music (most any
format). It's all part of the 'volume wars'. Stations clamoring to get
noticed in a sea of other stations, so they want their signal to be as loud
as possible.

Eduardo talks about how stations have been using compression for many
decades. This may well be true, but not the vast majority of them. Small
market stations were using no compression at all well into the 80's. One
public station I worked at never had it until their newest studios were
built in the early 90's. Until the late 80's, we didn't even have stereo
(management didn't want to cut our usable range, as we were only running
about 1.8 KW), and until the mid '80's, we were still using Korean war
surplus mixers and 50's era monaural professional recording equipment.
And you know what? We sounded great. Real radio. The only 'feeds' we used
were BBC radio off a shortwave receiver for 30 minutes a day and a feed from
city hall for the city council meetings. Most of the air people (including
myself) brought in their own record collections for use on the air. Format
was all over the road (oldies, jazz, classical, ethnic (we had a 15 year old
kid that played Chinese mantras and such, we used to kid him that they
sounded like a Congressional session) and whatever else anybody could come
up with.)