Compression
"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
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"Gary Eickmeier" wrote in message
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Just wondering if you use compression at all in your mastering. Most of
the time my recordings don't seem loud enough when played in the car. In
mastering, I keep the peaks below 0 dB, and so the rest of the material
is a little lower than a client might like. I'm just not real sure how to
do compression carefully and know what the consequences will be.Using
Adobe Audition 2.0.
I don't use formal dynamics compression as such very much.
What I've found is that most music and speech tracks have a relatively
small number of peaks that are 3-6 or more dB above the rest and often
have a very brief duration.
I use a set of custom gain envelopes for Audition/CEP2 that start out at
unity gain and implement shaped valleys that I can then apply to these
spurious peaks and bring them into line with the rest of the track.
I then use overall gain or normalization to bring the track average
levels up. I can generally boost average levels 3-6 dB and sometimes more,
which makes a big difference in how these tracks sound when played in a
noisy context. Yet the normal bounce and dynamics of the track are
largely preserved and there is not the mind-numbing sameness that seems to
plague heavily compressed tracks.
The hard limit function works very well for the outlier peaks, if used with
common sense and restraint.
Sean
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