"Brenda Ann" wrote in message
...


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.

If anything, processing is less on the average than it was in the 70's and
80's on FM, or the way it was in the 60's on AM.


Eduardo talks about how stations have been using compression for many
decades. This may well be true, but not the vast majority of them.

I don't recall ever seeing a US station without at least a peak limiter
going back to the late 50's. And everywhere I went, I visited stations...
ranging from places like Ludington, MI, to San Francisco.

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.


That may be true for a few public stations, but commercial stations knew two
things: if the listeners can't hear you, they won't listen... and the FCC
was genuinely intolerant of stations that did not have electronic control of
peak limiting.

The Levil Devils and such were the rule in the late 50's, and even major
market stations (you can hear them on airchecks) had what by today's
standards is horrible pumping and clipping from those early devices.

Then the Audimax and Volumax came out in the early 60's and we all went
crazy changing the components to get more clipping and greater and faster
AGC. The 80's brought multiband processors from Durrough and Gregg Labs and
such, and culminated with the Optimod.