As a classical guy, I avoid compression 99% of the time. I have found,
however, when recording a rock band with heavily distorted guitars, that
just about everything (except perhaps percussion) also needs a heavy dose
of compression. The gritty guitar sound is achieved by overloading a gain
stage (or two) which acts to massively compress the levels. Other more
dynamic instruments get buried unless they, too, get compressed.

And that distortion is part of the accepted character of electric guitars,
so I consider that part of the performance. However, with acoustic drums,
compression alters the character, sometimes useful to shape the kick drum
sound, if multi-miked, but most of the time, I find it reduces the exciting
qualities of live drums.


I just finished remastering my jazz quintet to a DVD. I used uncompressed
PCM audio for the soundtrack, rather than decimate it with Dolby AC3
encoding. The DVD sounds great.


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Best Regards,

Mark A. Weiss, P.E.
www.mwcomms.com
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