Quote:
Originally posted by Kingfrog:
Besides that, most of what is coming out of major studios today is very highly compressed with little dynamic range to make them loud and in one's face for 3.5 minutes. Something akin to what the Waves L2 would do to a track.

The gear is out there to make great sounding CD's at home. The demise of commercial Recording Studios are proof of that. Between that and regular folks lack of listening skills, we are fortunate our work is considered worthy at all. Who cares if Trevor Horn or David Foster likes it? Really? They are not our market. Joe and Joan Sixpack are and they are easy to please.


I'll agree that much of the music that comes out today from major record labels is what I would call seriously over compressed with practically no dynamic range. To me that's just an audio engineer either not doing his/her job properly or being told what to do from some label executive who knows nothing about great sound. No engineer who truly loves audio would ever over compress the hell out of their track only to have it lose all the dynamic range they strived to achieve in the recording process in the first place. Compression and Limiters should be used as tools to help make a track sound better not worse.

I'm going to have to disagree with you that the demise of many commercial studios is because you can now make a great sounding CD from home. The demise has to do more with people being cheap (yes cheap) and presuming they can record a World Class sound out of their home studio with little to no knowledge of audio engineering. It doesn't matter if you have the best gear money can buy at home, if you don't know how to use it then it's pointless. I've seen it happen time and time again where I am hired to record a drum or vocal track for a home studio recordist because they weren't able to achieve the sound they wanted. It wasn't for lack of gear although many times that can be the problem, it was from lack of knowledge on how to track and mix an instrument.

In my opinion the recording industry went into a downward spiral and audio quality has suffered from the proliferation of home based studios with people at the helm who lack engineering skills. Just because you own Pro Tools, an instrument or two, and a microphone does not make one an audio engineer. Far from it!

On the positive side cheaper gear has brought recording to the masses and those that could never afford to record a CD before can now do so. While many of these CD's are recorded for vanity reasons, there will always be those few that take the time to learn their craft seriously, record a CD that can compete sonically with other major label releases, and may even achieve airplay and sell well.