Re: Why contemporary music sounds terrible

["Stephen Goodman" <spgoodman@earthlight.net>]

Re: Radio station compression!

I'm remembering back to 1975-6, when I was at college for the first time 
with my first 'real' stereo.  20W RMS sounds different in a 9x12 
linoleum-floored room when you've been used to your larger, carpeted 
bedroom 
at home - duh! - and I was only slightly prepared for this by working in a 
stereo store before going to school.  This change of locale was also in 
terms of the kind of radio one could get (the difference between WQIV 'The 
Quadfather' or WNEW-FM in NYC, and the local station in Winston-Salem, NC 
was more than noticeable!): the midrange was particularly limited.  Every 
Sunday night the NC station would run a newly-released album; and one time 
it was Robin Trower's "For Earth Below"..  I recorded the album off-radio, 
and had listened to the tape for a week or two before buying it.  The 
difference in dynamics was really something noticeable, for instance snare 
drums with some reverb on them would continually hit a kind of audio 
ceiling.

Another example of this was the beginning of that old chestnut 
"Rollercoaster".  On the same station in Winston-Salem, what might have 
been 
normalization (?), one could hear the guitar riff separately from its 
reverb, and all were washed out by the kick-bass when it hit.  In NYC when 
I 
heard this on the radio nothing of the sort happened.  So I suspect that, 
in 
the beginnings of FM, all of the above affectations were up to the 
engineers 
at the station-in-question; while, in our ClearChannel universe, All Must 
Be 
The Same.

One thing I thought I should bring up since it hasn't been as yet: The 
possibility that studio engineers are putting everything up to near-0db in 
order to not only do mixing on a less competency-required basis, but 
compete 
with the commercials, which are loud enough at times to knock the Mute 
setting off altogether.  As we know, after all, commercials are FAR more 
important to executives than the mere fodder-bait they play between them, 
aka music.

Stephen Goodman
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