Radio Station eq'ing & limiting

[dabluesman]

A local radio station is throwing a contest for a new theme song so I submitted one of my mp3's. When they played it on the radio I was surprised of how bad it sounded, the low end got all mudied up. Then they ripped my song into a sample mp3 which really sounds terrible (and has almost no volume.) Does anyone know what's going on? Here are some of the mp3's:

my original un-radio-altered version
Recorded live from the radio onto tape then transfered to digital and re-eq'ed (sounds really rough)
mp3 sample created by the radio station

Oh, something about the mp3 samples, they are so freakin small (ie have very little volume.) I remastered all of them for the radio station with a loudness maximizer boost but they swear nothing is wrong with the originals. I'm now trying to get the webmaster to change them.. The radio stations contest page with the mp3's

By the way, please vote for my song! Vote for Dabluesman: Injured Hand

[Robertt8]

whoa! that is weird. It just sounds to me like the original is like 4 times louder. it seems odd that they'd mess with it to make it sound worse. You might want to contact someone at the station to see what the hell happened...unless they normalized all the entries to make them all sound like the same volume which would turn yours down...just a thought. either way. contact the station. good luck!

[dabluesman]

My fussing paid off. The webmaster switched the mp3's to the remastered versions I did. At least they have volume now. Anyone have any tricks for mastering, so it will also sound good on the radio?

[greggybud]

First of all, and assuming you cant afford a mastering engineer, dont just crank the loudness maxminzer and call it mastering.

Loudness maximizers were not designed to get much more than -4db gain. Remember they are peak limiters cutting off your spikes.

If you want loudness learn to utilize a single or multiband compressor. Perceived loudness comes from compression i.e. nice thick thick fat big waves and not spikey cut-off transients.

You can simply crank a maximizer but it wont sound nearly as good as if you obtain your loudness from a good compressor and then feed the limiter a good loud quality signal and let the maximizer add another 2db-3db.

Regarding the radio part you didnt mention the stations format or market size. A college radio station run by volunteers in a small market might have little or no compression. CHR, Rock, and Alternative format radio stations in large markets often have a chain of compressors, or maybe an Optimod, and other processing equipment that is designed to make their signal LOUD. It might help to talk to the broadcast engineer and ask about the stations processing.