With most consumers listening to music in mp3 format with cheap earbuds, I doubt whether it matters if we use a $30,000 compressor or a $200 one. The audio quality coming out of the playback device is still going to be crappy. Look at the rampant abuse of pitch correction plug-ins. Every time I go into a department store where they're playing background music with vocals, I can hear blatant examples of heavy-handed pitch correction on the vocals. Another abuse of the equipment is the way the audio is squashed down to within an inch of its life, so that there's about 2 db of dynamic range. Whether these abuses are accomplished in a million-dollar studio or somebody's bedroom using KillerDAW, the results to the consumer are about the same, given a recording engineer/producer with reasonable ears and technical acumen.

I agree with the previous posters who say that it's more about the musical and emotional content of the song; not the technical aspects. Well, if I had to guess, I'd say that the song is 80% of it, and the technical aspects of the recording are 20%.

--Doug

Visit the Elegance Music page on MySpace for samples of my current work.