So here's the next step to this.

In visits to listeners homes, to shows and to studios there is a confusion to what distortion vs compression sounds like and where it may be coming from. There are always cues to tell us what's going on and when we learn those cues we can do quick listens and tell what is happening with a system. This helps me a ton because when I show up I'm usually asked to go into action fairly quick.

here's a big cue

If you walk into someones place, studio or show and hear the music coming directly from the speaker instead of a stage in the room as your making your way to the main listening chair you have distortion somewhere in your system. You can play recordings with a lot of compression or not much and it won't matter. If the system is distorting (out of tune) the sound is pulled into the speaker. Give this a try. Make a straight path that goes in front of your left speaker, through the middle and over to and past your right speaker. Easier to tell if your speakers are not more than 4' tall but still doable. Make that path about a foot infront of the speakers plane and walk back and forth slowly a few times. Start at the wall, past the left, middle, right, to the other wall, turn around and walk back again. The two things you will notice off the batt is your left right hearing response and if your room is working with your speakers. You should see a soundstage behind the speaker at all times doing this. If the sound jumps in the speaker when you get near it your room is out of tune. In other words you should be able to stand right in front of the speaker and hear the sound coming from behind it. If you do the same test from the back side of the speaker you will see the stage on the other side of the room.

next test

Stand right inbetween the speakers one foot out from the plane again. Move side ways still facing forward and listen to the tone change as you get near the speaker. If as you get near the left speaker and you hear the sound jump from the front wall into the speaker and the pitch shift up, this means you have signal compression in the highs from the system itself. Do this from the left to right and listen to how different the sound is and in each case how close you can get to the speaker before the sound jumps into it. Also listen for any grouping of responses low mid or high that is more pronounced over the others.

The above is not recording compression but system compression.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune
http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/

Hi Catch

I absolutely agree with what the you-tube video said 100%. I just skimmed through the article but it looked like the same thing. I'm 100% on board with the loudness wars, and go through this like any good engineer does. Like I've said before I get this and have been up on this for quite some time and am continually involve. This is not what I am refering to though when I'm talking about playback systems.

Recording compression and playback compression are two completely different things.

maybe this will help

Listen to the typical playback system of the 70's 80's up through the mid 90's even. It's hard to generalize this but basically if you place the typical back then up against the typical high end now. The high end system now sounds up-tight (compressed) compared to the non-fatiguing systems back then.

I can tell by the way you keep jumping in with the loudness wars that your not getting what I'm trying to say, but what I am talking about is a completely different issue from what you are. Does that make sense or not? I'm not talking about the loudness wars in recordings I'm talking about the compressed distorted wars in audio designs of today.

I'm not sure how to help you understand that I, and probably all of us, are in total agreement about the loudness wars. That's a problem that will or won't get worked out as time goes on, it's an important issue but a different issue than I am and have been talking about. Catch I'm talking about what the playback systems are doing.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune
http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/

Hi readers

The question I would like to ask is, do you know what recorded compression sounds like?

If you know the sound of compression, you will know if your system is distorting or whether the sound you are hearing is recorded compression.

I know I mentioned this earlier but no one jumped on it, and it started me wondering if with all the mentions of compression maybe these people posting on it have never taken the time or had anyone show them what the difference is.

I said on another thread that I have very few CD's that sound bad enough that I would call the CD distorted (a bad CD), but I hear others say they have a bunch of bad sounding CD's. When I ask them, they say it's from recording compression, but when asking them to describe the sound, they don't describe the sound of recorded compression but system distortion. This is not to say that all recordings or all CD's are equal, not at all. There are tons of levels of performance from the artist, studio, mastering and CD copying, but we should not be blaming system distortion on the recording.

I wonder in this end of the hobby if listeners have been taught much about system distortion. When I read threads I often see that a listener is eager to place blame on anything but his own systems abilities to match the recorded code to the systems code. I started a thread called the audio code http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/t268-the-audio-code Which talks about something I hardly ever seen mentioned on any audio forum. The fact that the recording is a code, and this code does not get automatically played by a playback system. Could this be why audiophiles have never questioned the code? Maybe, and I think I'm right, the audio code has never been taught to the home listener or at least the high end audio home listener.

In the stereo days of the past when you got a system, you could read how to adjust your tape or table, and how to adjust your equalizer (tone control) and volume. A little later came the moving of speakers, and to follow that acoustics. But pick up a manuel now on high end gear and there's nothing about the adjustments. Is it making any sense yet? There's nothing on your components that allows you to match the recorded code to the systems signature. There's no button to push that reads auto code or manual.

So picture this again with me till it makes sense. The recordings all have a code that is unique to the recording. Are you with me there, can you buy into that? In the past the way they match the systems to the code was to have adjustments. When discrete came along the adjustments were removed, and even though the equipment was cutting out extra parts it lessoned how many recordings you could match to. That's a hard pill isn't it, but still very true. Somewhere in the chain you have to have a way to match the recorded code to the equipment code or your not going to play a wide range of music. Your playing some music and it sounds great and others ok, and yet others sound terribly out of sorts. This would and does happen with or without compression. If a system can't play the music it distorts trying.

did you get that

If a system can't play the signal it distorts trying. The distortion will come through as electrical or mechanical or acoustical. Again review the conditions of distortion signs.

music in speakers
banana shape stage
holes in the soundstage
shrunkin stage size
frequency clustering
upward frenquency tilt
un-balance stage spread
sound splatter

All of these are symptoms of a distorting system, not compression. Compression sounds like

less impact
less low to high dynamic peeks
thick vs rich
pushy

Notice that the compression doesn't place the music into the speakers, or make a banana stage or splatter. Compression is regarding the density of the stage, whereas playback system distortion is out of tune oscillations.

In the past there were tools the equipment used to help match up things, but when the hobby became more involved and discrete it meant that the system needed to rely more on the physics of audio, more than the manipulation of knobs. To do this you have to depend on simplicity, variable mechanics, and acoustical voicing. The past can be replaced and the systems can be discrete keeping the purity, but without these tools we have to use the next level of mating the recorded source to the audio pathway. The systems, any system, is not going to play the music by itself at the level of transparency the advance listener desires.

michael green
MGA/RoomTune
http://tuneland.techno-zone.net/