Junk Yard Swing Mix

[Pedaling Prince]

Thanx for the input.. it appears that I came late to the party,

If by that you mean how few comments you've gotten, I myself have found that if you comment on other people's mixes of the same song they'll tend to come around checking out yours. So usually right after I post I mix I make a point of reviewing everyone else's mixes of that song, whenever possible.

Audio compression (or limiting) is a fact of life in the world of music production, compression is used to deliver a product that can sustain playback on any system, big or small at any volume.

Yes. Which is a practice I abhor, one that I've made it my mission, as an aspiring audio engineer, to fight.

My guiding principle in mixing I call the "principle of least treatment." In general, I go as gently as possible on all processing, using only the minimum EQ, automation and compression necessary to get everything to blend smoothly, and under no circumstances do I ever apply processing or compression of any kind at the mastering stage; my goal is to preserve 100% of the dynamics of the original recording.

Having heard the crystal clean sound of CDs from the earliest days of consumer digital sound in the 1980s, comparing it to the overprocessed, overcompressed mess many commercial mixes are today, I have come to believe that current mixing techniques rely too heavily on processing, particularly the use/abuse of dynamic range compression in mastering you mention.

Now that I've created dynamic mixes from 137 of the multitracks on this site, mixes of some of my favourite songs now sound squashed and lifeless to my ears. For example, I'd love to get my hands on some of Meat Loaf's original multitracks, particularly for Bat Out of Hell III (you can really hear the differences in mastering techniques over the years if you listen to the original mixes of the three Bat Out of Hell albums ). The dynamic range on most of the tracks on Bat III is 9 dB or narrower, and generally I've found that dynamic range narrower than 10 dB never sounds good.

I've also noticed that recordings with dynamic range as wide as 14 dB can still be made plenty loud even on the tiny speaker of my iPhone. So, having tried both fully dynamic and dynamically compressed music on a wide variety of playing systems I have seen no evidence that masters with dynamic compression offer any benefit over fully dynamic mixes.

Besides, if Apple has its way, the whole point may soon be moot.

Apple has mandated that all iTunes Radio stations use Sound Check. Most people here probably know exactly what that is but, in brief, Sound Check automatically analyzes the overall volume of each song and aligns them so that they're all about the same volume; that way there are no wild swings in volume from one song to the next.

This "loudness war" insanity started, for the most part, because artists wanted their songs louder than their competitors' in the hope that their song would draw attention on the radio because it's louder than all the others. Well, with iTunes Radio, if you do manage to make your song louder than the others, iTunes will just turn it down to the level of the others, anyway. Dynamically compressed material, when level-matched with dynamic material, always ends up sounding washed out and wimpy because the brief transients that create that clarity and "sparkle" like the snap of drums, the pluck of a guitar string etc. usually squashed out with compression, and even if they don't they still don't peak as high above the average volume as they would have with the dynamics intact. So the dynamic recording, played on an even volume playing field with the compressed one, has the decided advantage.

Apple does tend to set trends; I'm hoping this development will discourage, and eventually eliminate entirely, this obsession with making recordings "loud" that has slowly ruined the sound quality of CDs from the late 1990s on.

Having said all that, I'm really getting curious as to what you've going to think of my mix of "Preach Right Here" when it's done...