Quote:

To help understand this -12 thing I need you to do this. If you have a pro level mixer look at the leds. You'll see that the "clip" led is at +12.You say "what difference does that make?".The reason is we didn't go from analog tape to digital computers and CDs. There was another step. We went from analog tape to digital tape machines BUT & this is a BIG but. All of the rest of the gear was still analog.
Compression is a good tool but often misused.It's real job was to take recored material with a large dynamic range and "squeeze"it so that it could be pressed onto a record that only has a dynamic range of around 54dB.



Agree and disagree here...

Some of us use compression because we stink at playing our instruments. Like when I play bass for church, I compress my incoming signal into the amp like the dickens because I'm still new at it and it makes the sound engineer's job easier not having to deal with inconsistent levels coming from my amp simulator. He can control the amount of content I contribute to the overall mix with much more ease than if I fed him a tentative player's output.

Compression has all kinds of uses both in helping to record, taming existing individual tracks for anomalies, and on final mix-down signals. Used in many different ways - one of them which was to prepare tracks for recording to tape and eventually for radio airplay and it's own signal to noise ratio challenges.

Some even use it as an effect intentionally - not to transparently hide overzealous transients, or to pull up too quiet sections, but to make use of the distortion that results intentionally. This has been done for years on drum signals in rock and other type of recordings and even live use. I let the kick and snare and overheads saturate a bit through our PreSonus ACP88 at church.

-Scott

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