Reply to post: Audio Compression

Audio Compression

Audio compression is not purely driven by laziness or a desire for loudness, there are (unfortunate) practical reasons as well.

Classic FM (UK national radio station playing classical music, for those not in the UK) was one of the first to widely use audio compression. Why? Because having long periods of (near) silence is not great for a radio station. Yes, they lost the range between the quiet sections and the loud sections but it was very clearly judged at the time that always broadcasting something was better than, often, broadcasting near silence. It also meant that the station became playable in more locations because a listener wouldn't leap out of their skin with the, often sudden, variations on volume level. Radio stations also tended to compress their audio not just for the periods of "silence" but to volume match consecutive tracks - no listener really wants to be able to barely hear one track followed by being nearly deafened by the following track because they had to crank up the volume for the previous track.

Moving onto the digital age, and the general contempt of "modern" music or "modern" digitisations, this is also done because tracks are more commonly listed outside of their own album. Adjusting the output volume as you start each album is annoying enough however with digital playback being what it is having to adjust for every track is just not acceptable. In short, playback habits have changed therefore carefully choreographed and sequenced albums are now much less likely to be produced compared to albums that are just containers for a set of tracks. While it's easily possible to adjust the playback levels based on the peak volume level this does not work because the overall perceived volume level is usually very different from the peak volume level, therefore processing is, unfortunately, necessary to reduce the distance between the low and the high volume levels and to adjust the perceived audio level to a set "standard" level.

So, in short, if you want to get a digital copy of an original audio source that is not compressed then choose carefully. It would be nice if the sources were marked as to whether or not they were compressed or not, there are some online sources that do clearly state that the content they provide is not but these are few and far between.