Rule number one of any kind of free-lance work:

If the client likes it, it rocks. If the client doesn't like it, it
sucks.

I agree with another poster who said that you ought to take your
business elsewhere. Your sound is your sound and no one should mess
with it. It's one thing to advise you so as to get the most from your
recording. Its another for someone to try to impose their will on your
work, whether it's appropriate or not.

I've used comp/limiting on certain projects of my own, but usually as
little as I could get by with (well, most of the time anyway). Most of
those projects were for broadcast, where consistent levels and
modulating for maximum coverage in fringe reception areas are
important. I've found that quite a bit of commercial music is
compressed/maximized to the hilt, which is presumably so that it'll
sound punchy even over a cheap system.

I don't know where this engineer got the idea that clipping improves
the sound of recorded music. Unless the artist WANTS to distort the
music (e.g. with a guitar distortion box), it simply doesn't belong.
(And digital clippage is much nastier than the analog variety IMHO).




(Ryan) wrote in message om...
I'm currently working on finishing a project I played on but I will
not be doing the final mixing. I'm trying to convince the mixer to
make it so the final .aiff files are not clipped in the type of way
most all gain addict current releases are. I learned that doing so
brings about a type of distortion from the good folks here at RAP.
The mixer says that all the stuff nowadays is clipped, that it's the
popular sound out there. And you know, now that I think of it, I
really can't notice this type of distortion much myself. It doesn't
bring about any artifacts or strange frequencies. Sure the dynamics
are non existant, but the *sound* of the tracks don't really suffer,
at least I can't tell they do. This guy has all types of gear
dedicated to getting every last dB out of his recordings. How do I
explain this to him in such a way that he will see the point? Help!