What equipment are you using and how is it connected?
Do I need a great compressor to get a pro sound?
- Thread starter yetipur
- Start date
Is it necessary to have a pro compressor/leveling amplifier/limiter to acheive a "Pro" sound?
When I look at the equipment lists in professional studios, they always have really high end compressors in their racks.........
even the Beatles at Abby Road for the life of their recorded output relied on the EMI RS124 Altec compressor. It was used on every guitar track, Pauls bass, and all the tape machine reduction mixes and vocals.
WHY? I don't understand what is so important about a compressor.
In the past, you needed comprressors to record to tape. The limited headroom of tape needed a workaround. Digital has plenty of headroom and compression is not necessary anymore except to make tracks fit into busy mixes or effect.
ranjam
New member
Unless I'm mixing my meds again, that's slightly backwards. Tape will natural compress slightly excessive signals, and sure; past that some tracks bleed to adjacent tracks giving you some of that distortion a few people claim is 'warm'. Digital? A brick wall. Unlike digital, analog tape does not have a flat frequency response. Luddites prefer low-frequency saturation on narrow-format analog tape. But compression started in radio as the engineers wanted their station signal to 'pop out' at you and still be within FCC guidlines of 100% modulation depth. You prevent overmodulation, and reduce the dynamic range, which allows for increased transmitted power. Recording? Compressors were a God-send for analog tape systems so you have an increased average level; above the noise floor and slightly below the saturation point. With digital it's back to making tracks 'pop out' at you.......
Hmmm. Skip it. I might be totally wrong, so I'd best bow out gracefully now.
There's elements of truth in both your posts... in fact the noise reduction systems of the day (DBX and Dolby) actually compressed the audio when encoding and then expanded while decoding to reduce the dynamic range to try and eliminate tape hiss from the quieter passages but still maintain a reasonable dynamic range... a compromise between noise and dynamics...
Unless I'm mixing my meds again, that's slightly backwards.
Bristol Posse
Okey Dokey
I don't use a hardware compressor on vocals but have been playing around for the last few days with PSP Old Timer software compressor on an input bus which has the same effect
It has a very nice analogesque coloration too it if you are looking for that on a vocal for a very affordable price compared to even cheap ass hardware, but honestly I don't really need it for peak control since I'm usually peaking at -10dbfs or lower on the way in without any compression applied it's all about added flavour
It has a very nice analogesque coloration too it if you are looking for that on a vocal for a very affordable price compared to even cheap ass hardware, but honestly I don't really need it for peak control since I'm usually peaking at -10dbfs or lower on the way in without any compression applied it's all about added flavour
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mrface2112
Well-known member
This thread should have ended right here.
If you want "pro sound", you need a pro making the sound and a pro capturing the sound.
cheers,
wade
You're actually kind of wrong here - tape sounds, generally, good when it is "hit hard." A/D converters without a "soft-limit" feature (like Apogee or Lavree have) sound really bad - even a sound that Ianis Xenakis wouldn't like - when "hit too hard.." But you're right that with 24 bit, capturing to 0 dB is not really necessary.
Compressors, especially in a digital environment, are used - either as you said, for effect ("coloration" - so to speak), or to make things loud as hell (or both). I guess if that's what you mean by "effect" then, yeah, but ultra-fast digital compression (limiting, that is) ala Waves L1/L2/L3 makes perceptual increases in loudness possible without obvious artifacts (for the average listener). So, if I put, for example, Ozone 4's limiter across a mix buss, depending on how it's set, the mix will simply sound -louder- than without it (again, to the non-pro mixing/mastering engineer).
To the original poster - no, you don't need super expensive high end compressors to make a pro recording, although, in the hands of somebody that knows what to do with them - to bring out their best aspects in their best allotment, they certainly won't hurt..