Hard Limiting will kill the dynamics

I don't think anyone here would argue with the application of limiting or compression in amounts determined by the final destination of the audio. Artistic, sensitive, control of levels and the acoustic experience, including dynamics, is part of the art of audio.

But I did work in radio for years, and was involved at one time in tests which resulted in the choice of particular equipment and, to some extent, settings for processing of audio for MF and FM transmission. These tests resulted in processors being installed in studio premises. Most processing nowadays has, I believe, been moved to the transmitter end of the STL and the settings adjusted to get a much higher perceived level.

I can make a more few observations on what has been posted here.

First, I have never met anyone working in radio who had decent monitoring equipment at home who liked the sound being radiated at them. I remember many, many expressions of despair.

Second, monitoring, if carried out on station, really shows up the gross distortion that is being transmitted, especially on medium wave. As digital transmissions, and therefore encoding and other delays have increased, the failure to monitor MF has tended to be joined by failure to monitor more and more of the quality of the final output. Therefore on-station monitoring never hears the worst excesses.

Third, there is an awful lot of hype-based advertising in these loudness wars, and, I suspect, an awful number of decisions on settings being made by people who have previously damaged their hearing with loud headphone listening for extended periods.

To say that 'everyone' thinks things sound better on radio is just totally ridiculous. Time BFM got a hearing test or a better receiver, I fear.    (NB Smiley added after I read this back!)

I'm chuckling to myself because, if the sound of radio was so bad you'd think some people (apart from engineers) would have mentoned it by now, but they haven't, not one listener, ever, has written to a radio station, not one single (non-technical) journalist has ever written an article complaining how bad radio sounds. You'd think that by now we would be aware that the general public absolutely hated the compression on records, but no, no one, not one person has ever complained about compression. The fact is, that (apart from engineers) people who do the broadcasting just love the compression. Absolutely every broadcaster or radio DJ you ask will tell you that they love the compressed feed in their headphones, those who listen to "desk" are not real radio bods, and some people will know who I'm referring to, right

Now, I do think that all you engineer types must be absolutely right about it, and given the genuine and sincere reasons why compression is used, is there an alternative? I think it's probably being over-used because digital sounds so flat and lifeless at the moment.

The fact is, that (apart from engineers) people who do the broadcasting just love the compression. Absolutely every broadcaster or radio DJ you ask will tell you that they love the compressed feed in their headphones, those who listen to "desk" are not real radio bods, and some people will know who I'm referring to, right

BFM's 'facts' are nothing like my experience. Many DJ/presenters also work in clubs, and I would say that about 50% of the ones I know have some sort of hearing damage. Many radio stations now use level-limiting headphones for safety reasons, and need them. I've had many, many discussions, initiated by producers and presenters, about broadcast distortion, and a great number of the complaints are not about the music, but about speech quality on certain voices.

I've no idea who BFM is referring to, but he may be right in that radio processing may be leading people towards expecting a more compressed sound. But the 'lifelessness' of many modern music is not only the result of lack of level dynamics. The major missing factor IMHO is the lack of any impression of 'depth', any perspective, in the music. There's all this technology to allow music to sound 'real', yet all the instruments tend to be brought right to the front of the mix and 'flattened'. Painters discovered perspective many centuries ago. Audio, when there were only one or two mics available, had it naturally. Now, much 'music' is recorded 'flat to the page'.

The same sort of effect is complained about with respect to TV  and seen in all the protests about the irrelevant background music being too loud. SWMBO was moaning about this only last night when she watched a programme about antiques, while making her regular joke about being married to one.

I'm chuckling to myself because, if the sound of radio was so bad you'd think some people (apart from engineers) would have mentoned it by now, but they haven't, not one listener, ever, has written to a radio station, not one single (non-technical) journalist has ever written an article complaining how bad radio sounds. You'd think that by now we would be aware that the general public absolutely hated the compression on records, but no, no one, not one person has ever complained about compression.

Shame you don't do any research. If you did, you'd find out that this is absolutely not true. The complaints even make it to the Daily Telegraph - here, and have got more frequent since the inception of DAB. If you check, even the ASA has upheld complaints about the advertising for DAB radio. And even a basic search will reveal loads more non-technical complaints about it, and not just about it getting worse with DAB, either. The BBC has apparently recieved thousands of complaints about the state of compressed DAB radio. This indicates very clearly that the public don't want it. Personally I don't care very much, because I've given up listening to most radio output because it sounds so piss-poor. Although that's before we even consider the lack of technical quality...

Now, I do think that all you engineer types must be absolutely right about it, and given the genuine and sincere reasons why compression is used, is there an alternative? I think it's probably being over-used because digital sounds so flat and lifeless at the moment.

Actually, it's the other way around. If you compress the bitrate of the digital stream even more, greater compression is inevitable. The reason that digital radio sounds flat and lifeless is that there are far too many stations jammed onto far too few multiplex streams. And I don't know what your definition of 'genuine and sincere reasons' might be, but I can't think of a single one, myself.

I'm chuckling to myself because, if the sound of radio was so bad you'd think some people (apart from engineers) would have mentoned it by now, but they haven't, not one listener, ever, has written to a radio station, not one single (non-technical) journalist has ever written an article complaining how bad radio sounds. You'd think that by now we would be aware that the general public absolutely hated the compression on records, but no, no one, not one person has ever complained about compression.

Shame you don't do any research. If you did, you'd find out that this is absolutely not true. The complaints even make it to the Daily Telegraph - here, and have got more frequent since the inception of DAB. If you check, even the ASA has upheld complaints about the advertising for DAB radio. And even a basic search will reveal loads more non-technical complaints about it, and not just about it getting worse with DAB, either. The BBC has apparently recieved thousands of complaints about the state of compressed DAB radio. This indicates very clearly that the public don't want it...

As the holder of a masters degree I can asure you, I know how to do research  ..I'm an undercover journo too .. damn .. cover blown.

The research and complaints I'm accused of not researching refer to DAB, and we were talking about regular FM radio

And .. I'm not all that surprised you can't think of a single genuine reason for using compression haha!

The research and complaints I'm accused of not researching refer to DAB, and we were talking about regular FM radio

Not only did you not research it, you didn't extrapolate the information I gave you either. Thousands of people have complained about limited bandwidth on DAB channels because it makes them sound compressed - and yes, the bandwidth compression causes reductions in the dynamic range as well as making everything sound gritty. Ergo, they don't like it in principle wherever it happens.

Yes, I can see a good reason for compressing the heck out of 'radio'. Since it's reduced itself in the main to a background source, there isn't much point in having a lot of dynamics in it, because it would keep disappearing. A bit like having your wallpaper fading in and out...

Reason 2 (as I already posted earlier) statistics show that a very high percentage of radio listening these days is in cars:  i.e. a noisy environment.  Compression makes it easier to hear...it doesn't make it sound good!

As for complaints, dig out some audiophile magazines sometime.  They're full of complaints about FM radio quality...from "discerning" listeners, NOT engineers.

B

[And finally, some truisms regarding loudness and quality:]

Reason 2 (as I already posted earlier) statistics show that a very high percentage of radio listening these days is in cars:  i.e. a noisy environment.  Compression makes it easier to hear...it doesn't make it sound good!

But isn't this all back to front?

We have all these selfish producers and advertisers wanting their product to be louder than everybody else's because they seem to be under the illusion that people will take more notice, or even more frightening for them, ignore them if they are quieter. And then we have all these selfish radio stations who actively encourage them to do this, whilst all the time levelling it all out anyway with an Optimod set to 'stun' (which makes all of the producers', etc. attempts to influence this, whatever they are, completely irrelevant).

Doesn't it make rather more sense to adapt the signal you recieve to the environment you are in? Most people don't realise this, but the DAB system does actually allow you to set the reciever compression level on incoming signals - the DRC setting. Trouble is, if you alter it, it makes virtually no difference on most material, because it's already been completely nobbled for no dynamics anyway.    But if done properly, you could arrange to have extra compression available for cars if you wanted - or even an adaptive system that takes account of the surrounding noise.

But no. We have the technology in place to address this issue, and because of selfishness on the part of everybody involved in the transmission chain (especially the people involved in cramming even more crap minority stations onto multiplexes), it doesn't work. These people appear not to care one jot about the people who attempt to listen to this junk - as opposed to having it on in the background as wallpaper. So now, listening has become an unrealistic thing to do for very long, because it's so annoying - you have to turn it down.

Bernie's perfectly entitled to think that all compressed radio sounds wonderful to him - but he's clearly not right in assuming that 'everybody loves it', because they simply don't - QED. Trouble is, now overcompression's in a vicious circle, and breaking it is not going to be so easy. It's one of those perverse things really - we now have the technology that makes a very successful job of removing all of the dynamics of anything you throw at it, but no moral philosopy about it whatsoever.

Orban  want to sell more Optimods, yeah. But they're actually rather more moral about this than a lot of people might suspect. I hope they'll forgive me for quoting a paragraph from their 'Maintaining audio quality in the broadcast facility' document, but it does make the point rather well, in some ways:

And finally, some truisms regarding loudness and quality:

Every radio is equipped with a volume control, and every listener knows how to use it. If the listener has access to the volume control, he or she will adjust it to his or her preferred loudness. After said listener does this, the only thing left distinguishing the “sound” of the radio station is its texture, which will be either clean or degraded, depending on the source quality and the audio processing.

Any Program Director who boasts of his station’s $20,000 worth of “enhancement” equipment should be first taken to a physician who can clean the wax from his ears, then forced to swear that he is not under the influence of any suspicious substances, and finally placed gently but firmly in front of a high-quality monitor system for a demonstration of the degradation that $20,000 worth of “enhancement” causes!

Always remember that less is more.

Steve, I agree with everything you are saying but unfortunately we are dealing with aspects potentially out of our control. You can argue society has lost its way and we've been saying this for generations. Remember the phrase " It wasn't like that in my day"

Well, yes! we do have the power to use stuff under our fingertips but are we getting the message across. Obviously not!

The long and short is, do we as a musical society go back to what we did best, or do we adopt what is now termed as the "new direction"?

My answer would be to "Educate" the public to encourage DYNAMICS within the field of music and show people there is another side to compressed loudness where vitality is expressed through silence.

... but unfortunately we are dealing with aspects potentially out of our control. You can argue society has lost its way and we've been saying this for generations. Remember the phrase " It wasn't like that in my day"

I think that in part, one of the driving forces behind this was something that actually happenened back then, and you don't hear now so much - powerful AM radio. Certainly here, it is since the advent of the really powerful pirate transmitters that people have been subjected to much reduced dynamics - it was their style that paved the way for this, and the majority of 45's released in the 60's had some form of compression applied to them, usually at the mastering stage. Non-linearity in the transmitter modulators and the shouting jocks took care of the rest.

Back then, a lot of people said that they preferred this sort of approach, and when broadcasting became a predominantly FM affair (far more linear, and so far the best format we've had for it - including DAB), attempts were made to replicate some of the fabled 'sound' of AM, certainly for the 'pop' stations. Trouble is, that FM is a revealing medium compared to AM, and this is when a lot of people gradually became aware that the AM 'sound' wasn't really that good at all. Yes, it worked fine as a way around the limitations of the medium wave band and a frequency response that nearly extended up to 5kHz - and it still does, if you care to do it - but it isn't really applicable elsewhere, simply because it sounds crap - you really do need all that AM distortion and restricted frequency range for that sort of sound to work.

So in part we have all these problems because some misguided people tried to hark back to the so-called  'good old days'. And really, they weren't that good at all. We had the opportunity to move forward, and as with so many other things, we simply didn't, even though we thought we had.

Compression applied at the point of delivery would seem to be the ideal.  Let's face it, a lot of the time people are not sitting comfortably in a quiet room listening intently.  They are in noisy environments or moving around and do not want to be constantly going to the volume control to hear the quiet bits or suppress the loud bits.  But sometimes they will want to hear a wider range, and should be able to choose to do so.

Maybe compression should be built into music reproduction systems - complete with a bypass control - and not employed at all, or only sparingly, in broadcast or distribution systems.

But of course it's now too late.

Maybe compression should be built into music reproduction systems - complete with a bypass control - and not employed at all, or only sparingly, in broadcast or distribution systems.

I thought Dolby was some sort of attempt at this and don't forget the "Loudness" button. My 1st JVC had this in 1980. I never had the button up

Maybe compression should be built into music reproduction systems - complete with a bypass control - and not employed at all, or only sparingly, in broadcast or distribution systems.

I thought Dolby was some sort of attempt at this...

No, Dolby systems, if employed correctly, are a means of expanding the usable dynamic range, not compressing it. You compress the signal through the transmission system to avoid adding system noise at its normal level, and expand again to reduce the noise (which is added, because you can't avoid it) back down again - giving you a greater available S/N ratio.

Inherently, using Dolby on a radio transmission chain (if you actually could)  would bring up all of the lower-level sound; i.e., it's compressed. But because you need accurate level matching to restore a Dolbied signal, it isn't used in linear radio transmission at all.

But it's not all bad news; in another sense, you do have the bare bones of a workable system here, and to a first approximation, it's what is supposed to happen with DAB's DRC. If somebody transmits compressed signals using a reversible algorithm to your radio, they come out normally sounding compressed. But if you choose to decode them, then you get the dynamic range back. Until, that is, the broadcaster either ignores it completely, or fixes the signal with an Optimod so that what you get back when the DRC is switched off is the station's heavily compressed original anyway...

Inherently, using Dolby on a radio transmission chain (if you actually could)  would bring up all of the lower-level sound; i.e., it's compressed. But because you need accurate level matching to restore a Dolbied signal, it isn't used in linear radio transmission at all.

Wasn't dbx used in some cases?  Level matching wasn't such a bugaboo with dbx, though frequency response errors were.  I suspect limiting the frequency range of the control band (similar to, but maybe more than, the type II used on cassettes) would help this.

Maybe compression should be built into music reproduction systems - complete with a bypass control - and not employed at all, or only sparingly, in broadcast or distribution systems.

I thought Dolby was some sort of attempt at this and don't forget the "Loudness" button. My 1st JVC had this in 1980. I never had the button up

Actually, the typical loudness button had nothing to do with compression.  It was basically a bass boost (sometimes with a slight treble boost) to mitigate the effects of the Fletcher-Munson curve in our hearing response at low levels (we are less sensitive to bass & treble as volume drops).  Some units had multiple positions, and a nice implementation by Yamaha was actually an attenuator - you set your volume control to "loudest you ever listen", and then use the "loudness" attenuator (that was VARIABLY FR compensated) to adjust volume.  Slick, IMO.