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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 * * Cartoons about DVDs and Stuff * http://www.earthlight.net/HiddenTrack * The Loop Of The Week since 1996! * http://www.earthlight.net/Studios