The Truth about
Quick! How many grooves are there on a
vinyl record? If you’re old enough to have
played a record on a record player, you’ll
realize there is, in fact, only one on each
side. One groove starts on the outside edge
of the disc and spirals inward until the lockout part of the groove (where the groove is
allowed to make a closed circle) surrounds
the label. If you understand that the groove
was cut into the disc in such a way that the
louder the recorded signal the more the
needle (stylus) swings back and forth, you
can appreciate how important is was to
make sure the louder signals were never
allowed to get so loud that the groove
crossed over into the previous spiral.
principle weapons in the “Loudness Wars,”
both in hardware and software versions.
Record companies and artists don’t want
their recordings to be less loud than someone else’s. The consensus is that louder
sounds better, and that listeners don’t want
to be constantly changing the volume on
their players from song to song, even if
this means the dynamics of the music are
altered. Producers often want every sound
to have as much impact as possible.
True or false: commercials are louder than the
shows between them. Although they often
sound louder, the loudest part of a television
show is as loud as a commercial. The difference is that the average volume level of the
commercial is probably louder than the average level of the dialogue in a show.
Crucial to both forms of sound delivery are
devices called Compressors and Limiters.
Sometimes described as tools for making loud sounds softer and soft sounds
louder, these devices are used in almost
every recording or broadcast you’ve ever
heard. In the music business, they are the
How They Work
Before the invention of compressor/limiters
(comp/limiters), a sound engineer had to
anticipate peaks or reductions in volume and
manually lower or raise the input volume control (known as a fader) to prevent incoming
signals from overloading and distorting the
recorder or broadcast transmitter. Conversely,
the engineer would raise lower levels of a
performance, so it could be clearly heard and
recorded. Experienced engineers continue to
“ride gain” when recording and mixing today,
as it can sometimes sound cleaner than using
a hardware device.
Compressors and limiters use amplifiers that
can turn down the volume of a signal automatically when the level increases above a
user-selected point called the threshold. To
accomplish this, the input signal is split into
