In article ,
Carey Carlan wrote:

Jay Kadis wrote in
:

The flushing up of the low-amplitude sonic details by compression and
limiting and judicious spectral tweeking with EQ make the sound
realistic in the sense that you can hear the details of the sounds
even when they would have otherwise been masked in a complicated mix.
But it's not what you would hear in the tracking room.

The term hyper-realistic comes from Dan Levitin, a former editor for
RE/P and now a cognitive psychologist at McGill.

I understand and agree with compression and EQ when creating a mix. Do you
agree that, given an agreeable source, they aren't necessary in a solo
stereo setting?


Absolutely. I was only referring to rock'n'roll context.

But how about in the mastering stage? I'm editing an early music recorder CD
that my brother is co-producing, Buxtehude and the like, and they are concerned
with getting the volume of the CD up to "commercial" levels. I think we're
going to need to use some clean limiting on that. But I wouldn't mess with the
dynamics any more than that.

I am sometimes asked for a "car" mix, meaning squashed to hell. I can do
that, too, and it even sounds OK when I use the limiter built into my
Spider (an underrated feature of that august machine). But my main focus
is full dynamic range. The sample I posted on my webpage approaches 70 dB
from quietest to peak.

Then there's the issue of the noise floor in churches and similar venues.
Recording a harpsichord in a very ambient church in the middle of town does
present its problems. Have you ever used expansion?

-Jay
--
x------- Jay Kadis ------- x---- Jay's Attic Studio ------x
x Lecturer, Audio Engineer x Dexter Records x
x CCRMA, Stanford University x http://www.offbeats.com/ x
x---------- http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jay/ ------------x