01.20Compression Wars – The Subtle Art of Sounding Big
A Beautiful Crosley Radio in Studio1A
It seems like yesterday. AM radio stations (long, long ago) played music …and lots of it.
During the Good Old Days, there was a very real rivalry between same-market stations. The station jocks were in a constant state of competition both on and off the air. It was a great time in history for broadcasting.
Music Directors would speed up music to make songs sound “dull” on other stations. No chairs were permitted in the control room, because everyone needed that stand-up energy to talk up music right to the post.
Engineers were dragged into the game by management to pump up the audio, sometimes to ridiculous levels of compression and limiting. A stations processing strategy was a coveted secret and always highly guarded. Just how “hot” could the amplitude get? Pretty hot.
As formats and music style changed on the AM band from early live concerts and plays to the Big Band Era, Rock and Roll and the Big Hair bands, the Sun was setting for music on AM. Frequency Modulation struggled, then capitalized on its high-fidelity standard and forever changed the way we listen to the AM Broadcast Band. Ironically, AM came back, stronger than ever as a strange new form of syndication, called Talk Radio, began sweeping the nation.
People often ask me why I run the processing a little hot at Studio1A. I always smile a little and think back to the days of the big AM sound, when loud was king. Don’t get me wrong, there is a line between strong processing and inducing listener fatigue. That line is always a little lower or higher, depending on your tastes, background and goals.
Just what is the right mix of processing for New Media? Perhaps history has already begun to repeat itself? I remember the early Podcasts and Streams with little or no compression and limiting. Just a few years down the road, the sound is remarkably more refined, thanks to processing.
Could there ever be another round of compression or codec wars in New Media? Extremes are rarely good in any venue, but we all like to punch the accelerator sometimes.
Best,
MarkJensen
