Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Fun with Audacity - Dynamic Compression

Mark. I didn't find out about dyanamic compression until after my brother gave all our vinyl. I suspect that with well mastered vinyl you could transcode to digital filtering out the snap crackle pop and still come out with a better sound than more recently mastered material.

Fred

Pity you wouldn't have the newer music...

Well, right now I am concentrating on rebuilding my collection of older music. Speaking of which, I just picked up Dire Straits Live at the BBC.

I'm gonna copy a couple of my CDs to disk and take a look at them using audacity.

Fred

Here's a "zoomed in" look at a small section of Lubbock or Leave it, amounting to a few hundreths of a second. Apparent clipping is marked with arrows.

I did find an article when google searching that talked about anthing that gets chopped off flat above 1.0 or below -1.0 is an example of clipping. The dB waveform from the dropdown is pretty cool as well.

I'll have to check some of my old metal cd's from the 80's.

You guys beat me to it, I have been working on looking at all my cds to see which ones are clipped or just plain too loud and then I was going to post my results. I am also going to compare any remastered cds against the originals I happen to have.

That'll be a good comparison, Jason. I was wondering about that this morning--the remasters vs. the originals.

OK folks, let the fun begin. I started with Dire Straits Live at the BBC (havn't even listened to it yet)track 1, Down to the Waterline.

When I opened it in Audacity it looked pretty crunched towards the end of the song.


Once you zoom in though it looks pretty good. Looks like a tiny bit of clipping but nothing really.



From what I have read here, anything done by Knopfler is damn good.

Not bad

Next up, a classic. Led Zeppilin 1 Dazed and Confused. Interestingly, the full view of the song looks less crunched than the Straits song. Once you zoom in though...



OK, not really bat at all, but you can see there is more stuff right at the edge and some clipping.

So far so good. Theres something to be said for liking old stuff that was burned in the 80s and 90s.

Next up...

... Santana, Supernatural. Its really my only recent CD.

And looking at the full song...



We have a winner folks. Dosn't look any better zoomed in.



I must say, I am kind of dissapointed with Santana. I always though of him as a musicians musician.

I was impressed with the Dire Straits track. Once you zoom in, you can see a fair amount of dynamic range in the recording, even though it is fairly loud.

As an interesting side note, in the late 70s and early 80s when I recorded a lot of stuff tape to tape, the rule of thumb was to set the volume so that those nifty digital meters were just below red (no clipping) even though none of us knew what clipping was.

By the way Jason, I remember reading an article where the author gave an example of a Zeppelin song with the original, remastered in the 90s and remastered post 2000. You could see the progressive increase in volume and dynamic compression. The last one didn't look quite as bad as the Dixie Chicks or Santana, but it was close.