The Earworm Podcast - Episode 4 Squeeze the Day! COMPRESSORS

On episode four of The Earworm Podcast,  Patrick and Bryan dive into the world of audio compression, unpacking concepts like ADSR, decibel levels, and hearing protection while tracing compression’s origins back to early broadcast regulation in the 1930s. The episode explores how compression shaped music and radio, leading into the “loudness wars” of the ’90s and 2000s—an era defined by hyper-compressed, overly loud tracks that sacrificed dynamic range and musicality for perceived impact. What started as a competitive edge ultimately led to listener fatigue and a broader industry reassessment of sound quality.

From there, the conversation breaks down the mechanics of compression in an approachable way, using the “TAKAR” framework (threshold, attack, knee, ratio, release) and vivid analogies from nightclubs to red carpet chaos, to explain how compressors shape sound. The boys also compare analog vs. digital compression, discuss handling fast transients like drums, and emphasize the importance of dynamic range in creating emotional depth. The episode closes with a practical turn, highlighting hearing protection strategies—including custom ear molds and smart use of noise-canceling tech and underscoring that great sound starts with preserving your ears.

Let's get mild!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:36

Welcome to the podcast episode of the sheds and light on one of the most misunderstood topics in all of audio compression. We're also going to talk about ADSR, attack, decay, sustain release. We're going to talk about decibel levels. We're going to talk about hearing.

SPEAKER_01 0:58

We really went off on a tangent last week. We did. Like we fully intended to do this episode. Yeah, we did. Didn't happen. No. You started talking about volcanoes and shrimp. And like I got totally, totally aroused, if you will. So getting into it.

SPEAKER_00 1:14

Yeah. Getting into it. So it really will come down to can you hear compression? Maybe we'll reference some specific recordings, albums, or individual tracks. In the thick of things, you don't really want to hear compression unless you want to hear compression. Does that make sense? In other words, it can be an effect as much the same way that a distortion pedal can be, or a delay pedal, or anything else. It can actually be an effect if you choose to do that. If you don't, then you don't want to hear it. You want the music to be able to breathe.

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Yeah, if you're using it as like a compressor limiter, it's best for the engineer you wouldn't even know that it happened, right? It's like you don't even know that it was there.

SPEAKER_03 1:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

So my my understanding, and this is the this is the I got my notebook out, I'm learning today lots of things. Hat, I am the student today. And uh what I understand about compression is when you have you have a wavelength, right? That is your typical sound, the way that it is communicated, whatever spectrum that you it is on, the sound, and there are peaks and there are valleys, highest of the peaks, can can clip out your speakers, can cause distortion, et cetera. Uh you have inaudible bass that is way at the bottom, uh different and really, really low frequencies. And basically what a compressor does is it takes the waveform and it actually kind of squishes it to a to a tunnel so it stays within a certain parameter.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Is that right? Aaron Ross Powell Yeah, that's a good way of thinking about it. I mean, uh most people, like a layman might describe it as, and I've heard it described this way before, which is it makes the loud parts quieter and the quiet parts louder. Aaron Powell Gotcha. Um that's the that's the end result in the way that we psychoacoustically perceive it, but but that's not really what the circuit is actually designed to do.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Aaron Powell And it's insane because and I've been in the in music for a long time. I've used compression pedals on my guitar, several different ones. And I'm like, that one sounds better. I have no idea what it's doing. And I've used it on effects for tracks before and backing vocals, all kinds of things, and never really thinking about it. Um so I think this is a really this is really interesting for me. So uh to get into history, right? So 1937, FDR created the FCC. It was the uh uh Communications Act of 1934, basically to standardize. Well, it was in 1934 or 1937? Did you say 34 is when the FCC was created? Okay. Uh and that was in order to standardize a lot of things, whether it's uh the volume that's going out, the amount of power that the station is emitting. Controversially, some would say there's a content piece to that. We can maybe touch on that on another episode, uh, because that's a whole other uh conversation. But over a period of time, you had all of these transmit operators that were working at the radio stations, and you always had to have this one person and sometimes several because how large radio was at the time. Radio was the medium. This was there were very few TVs in 1934. And uh a lot of people, most of what they got was either at a live thing, a newspaper, or all of their entertainment was coming from the radio. And in fact, we're doing a radio show right now.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Yeah, digitally.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Digitally. Yeah. Yeah. Um but at that in 1934, so that all standardized, and so you had all this labor that was being spent to have for these transmit operators, and then you were getting varying degrees of style and what the transmit operator would decide makes the most sense. So they were never really able to standardize it until 1937. Western Electric puts these giant refrigerators in each of these radio stations, the 110A, that was able to limit and compress the signal before it went out to be able to stay within the guideline.

SPEAKER_00 4:37

Yeah, and it is. And just to draw a little bit of a nuance on that point is that there's a difference, and we'll get to this later on, uh, between what a compressor and a limiter is. Sure. Even though it's the same type of procedure, there's a very clear line of demarcation that uh that makes something go from being a compressor to a limiter.

SPEAKER_01 4:57

Aaron Powell Maybe this is where we start.

SPEAKER_00 4:59

Okay, cool. So yeah, when you when you think about early radio and you think about the broadcasting strength of the tower and the power that it could do, you uh early radio, especially with Armstrong's invention of the audion tube, which caused the tube to self-oscillate, and that's where you started to get frequency modulation from. So this is Edwin Armstrong is the real inventor of that. Okay. Um DeForest basically drove Armstrong to suicide. Um and if you've never seen the documentary Empires of the Air, it is absolutely fascinating journey and will just make you weep and also uh jump up and down and j enjoy. But um but it's fantastic. The development of RCA and the whole tube, and it's just it's it's it's amazing. So when these early radio stations actually started to broadcast, the idea was like, well, what's your footprint? I mean, how far can you go? Now there's an old Z Z top song, me being uh you know a good old Texas boy and loving, you know, me some Billy Gibbons. Um they had a song called I Heard It on the X. Well, the X was a radio station that was south of Laredo. And it was across the border in Mexico, but it could literally broadcast it was so strong that it was hitting Pennsylvania, it was hitting all almost the uh entire length of the eastern seaboard. It was that strong. Wow. Uh and so, you know, WSM here in in Nashville, just a few miles away from where we are now, um, you know, that's still a working tower. Uh, and so how do you limit the broadcasting, particularly when there's only so much bandwidth? You know, what is what is 95.5 in Nashville as opposed to 95.5 in Little Rock or 95.5 in Dallas or 95.5 in Tulsa. You know, they're not the same radio station re-reboosting each other. There are totally different formatted stations. And this is the day when if you owned a radio station, it was a private enterprise. Sure. It wasn't totally, you know, we don't have it like it is now where it's a giant fucking monolith, and you have, you know, clear channel, and you have these giant corporations that are programming everything.

SPEAKER_01 7:06

Right. Well, you and you think about it, I think this is a really interesting, and this could be a whole another episode on itself, is um prior to the FCC, when you had different varying degrees of radio frequency power that were going out, helped develop genres of music. Reggae came from 870 a.m. in New Orleans getting blasted across the Caribbean.

SPEAKER_03 7:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:26

It's you know, rock and roll became what it was because blues was reaching places that you never would have thought of. And you know, limiting that, and and I know this is that's a totally different conversation, but I think that that it's all relative to the strength of the radio station, how powerful it was, and then what happens when you limit the space it can cover.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

Yeah, yeah, you did, yeah. And you had pirate radio and everything else that didn't want to take out an FCC license because you had to have a license to broadcast. Right. Right? The government needed to know where these transmitters were, not only so they could control this new market in much the same way that we're trying to put our arms around AI, going, wait, okay, who's got control of what? And is there overlap and are we causing more con confusion and doing more harm than good? Right. So radio was very much that way. You know, pre-television, you got to like put your you know, sort of time travel mind on and just sort of watch this in your in your mind's eye for a minute and think about what was life like before moving pictures.

SPEAKER_01 8:21

Right. And then, you know, what the development of the limiting compressing once you started broadcasting television. Yeah. Because not only did you have No, it's a whole different audio that was involved with that as well. So then you had music and big band and all the dynamics. Yeah. You know.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

Yeah, and there was there was certainly uh obviously moving pictures during the time of radio, but the but we didn't have broadcast national television where you had these networks at the time, which were, you know, Mutual of Omaha had its own network, just like ABC, CBS.

SPEAKER_01 8:48

It was about right that time, like right when the dawn of World War II, right? Because you had anyway, broadcast news.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Yes. Yeah, exactly. So in how all this starts to work getting back to like what does this have to do with compression? I know. Aren't they supposed to be talking about compression?

SPEAKER_02 9:02

It's a fun radio show.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

But it where we're we like to be thorough. Yeah. Uh so I think what ends up happening uh is that the FCC steps in, they basically say, look, we need to make sure that A, listeners can have uh a very strong signal in the sense of no matter where they are within a given radius to the broadcasting tower itself. So we need to make sure that they are going to be able to hear it well, but we also need to make sure that it's not going to just be overly loud, that it's going to sound noticeably different from another station that may be on a different dial, a different frequency. So uh so this was a way that they could kind of homogenize things. Now, here's one of the things that we are going to be talking about later, which is the loudness wars.

unknown 9:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:48

Right? It's basically that we went through this in the 90s and in the 2000s, you know, late 90s and early 2000s, too, up to about 2010. Um we got into the same thing with radio where people started mastering their final tracks louder and louder and louder. And the the thought was, and they were able to game the system for a while, which was uh it was a competitive advantage because when you put your song on the radio, it sounded louder. And to the relative listener, louder is better. Right? And it would make more of an impact. People would pay attention to it more, which would translate into record sales and so on and so forth. Turns out it didn't really happen quite as neat as they envisioned it. And it actually led to some really horrific uh just butchering of great records.

SPEAKER_01 10:37

Yeah, you get to a point where there's diminishing returns, the you know, the louder it gets, and then it starts getting painful to listen to. Yeah, or or just or it's clipping or it's distorted or it or it sounds flat. Like there's I I've noticed some of those records that are that are trying to be really loud have this air that feels like it's above it that you can't really get rid of. So it's like you hit that loudness point, and then it's now it's just hurts. It does hurt.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

It's because there's no real dynamic reduction in in range. So this is kind of a well you pointed out to me last week.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

We were listening to a particular record from actually from early 2000s, something like that. And I had never heard it the way because it's done by a very great producer, the the uh recordings are great, the engineering, everything's great. But the way that it was put together, it just there's something wrong, you know? Yeah. It's hard to pinpoint, at least for the layman.

SPEAKER_00 11:26

Yeah, well, and let's well, I'll shed, I'll hopefully I'll be able to shed some light on that. Because it's important that we understand what's going on and how we ingest, you know, music. I'll tell you what it's like. If you're if you're not sure what we're talking about and you're like, what is what is what the hell are they doing? Think of it this way, visually. It would be like instead of you having natural light in a movie, right? Um so uh Barry Linden, Kubrick, right? That entire have you ever seen that movie, Barry Linden? No. Um but it's all filmed in natural light. They used no artificial light. Interesting. So when you saw a candlelight, it was literally the candlelight that was lighting the room. Or or they only used outside ambient lighting. It was be it was a it was a wonderful masterclass on how to use natural lighting as opposed to faux lighting. Well, imagine if everything that we saw in a movie, like let's say you wanted to go see something that was visually shot um in a in a wonderful thing. I'm thinking of like 1914. I'm just picking a movie at random, right? Or think of Kurosawa, think of Ran, or you think of you can't use Citizen Kane because it's monochrome, it's black and white. But just think of some great movie that you love that's in color, Star Wars. Okay, let's do Star Wars. Imagine I agree.

SPEAKER_01 12:46

Let's do that.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

It's my favorite movie of all time. 1977, the OG. New Hope, Blue Harvest. Yeah, I'm in. And the original cut. Yeah. Sidebar, what the fuck? Why do they have to keep butchering all the Star Wars franchising by adding extra shit in the background?

SPEAKER_01 13:01

No, the technology just wasn't where it needed to be when we made the original one, so it just kind of took the vision, and it's like, dude, you got older, is really what happened. Yeah, you got scared. And you wanted to play with it too much.

SPEAKER_00 13:11

And I think he started listening to critics, which which if he did that, he would have never made the movie. George Lucas, we love you, but honestly, can we I'm just gonna be the first guy. Let's just start a petition right now. Earworm is where it starts, right? Episode four, we're gonna start a petition. Bring back the original theatrical release of episode four, Star Wars 1977 cut.

SPEAKER_01 13:33

You know, I was recently at Half Price Books and they had the original cut uh trilogy, and I didn't pick it up, and it was like twelve dollars. I don't know why I didn't buy it. I was like, I don't have it, I have it on Blu-ray. Right. So it's got all the extra monsters and flyovers and the different explosions and greedos shooting first.

SPEAKER_00 13:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:51

I don't know.

unknown 13:52

I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 13:52

Anyway I won't do it okay, well anyway, we we digress heavily. Yeah. But uh but anyway, but with natural light. So imagine Star Wars, but instead of being the colors that you know, they were all like neon, super bright. It looked imagine it was just shot in a in a Tokyo tattoo parlor with lots of neon signs. It would lose its effect. That's essentially what happens in audio when we overprocess and over-compress files.

SPEAKER_02 14:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

We do we do exactly the same thing. And it can get tiresome to the ear, where and just in in the same way that if you see so much of the same color, that the entire color spectrum neoned out and blasted at your eyes, after a while your eyes get tired.

SPEAKER_01 14:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

Same thing with our ears.

SPEAKER_01 14:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:37

Right? So that's where compression really starts to come in. So back to radio days, we're trying to figure out like what's the standard, and they had to play with it a little bit before they kind of dialed it in. Um last time I checked, uh, this is uh going back into the 90s, the standard FCC regulation was it needed to be followed two limiters in series, so it means one going into another instead of parallel, which would be two units at the same time. This is like you you take whatever audio. So imagine you know you've got death cap for cutie and it's going into uh a limiter at 16 to 1 ratio, followed by another 16 to 1 ratio, and that would sort of shave all the hair, all the bark, all the you know, all the sort of moss off the tree, and it would essentially shoot out a beautiful piece of pulp at the end.

SPEAKER_01 15:27

That's really interesting to me. I didn't assume, and this is assumptions, right? I don't know these things, but I would didn't assume that they had a specific frequency guideline. I thought they just cared about the outcome of what was kept being put out. But but technically they have you have to use these limiters at these ratios for this. Yeah. Okay, interesting.

SPEAKER_00 15:45

But the but they're there, it's full bandwidth in the sense of frequency. So it'll go from you know 20 hertz to 22k, right? That's the range of human hearing. Right. Now in the digital world, they'll they'll be much higher than that, but that that's only because uh when you sample something, you have to sample it twice to get a full picture, at the very least. Right. And even then it's rough. And we can get into sampling and bitrate and all the other kind of cool stuff.

SPEAKER_01 16:09

Oh, other episode.

SPEAKER_00 16:10

Yeah, yeah. But um but that's that's essentially what compression was doing. At that point, it was at such a high ratio that it was a limiting uh sort of procedure rather than compression. So let me just define that really quickly before we do it. The difference between a compressor and a limiter is this. If it's over 10 to 1 ratio, then that means that for every 10 decibels that it goes over a certain threshold point, the net outcome of the once it goes through the compressor, it will only raise one decibel. Right? Okay. So that's very that's squashing audio heavily. Um so if it's over ten to one, it's considered to be a limiter. If it's less than that, then it is a compressor.

SPEAKER_01 16:59

Interesting.

SPEAKER_00 16:59

So you'll see like a classic piece of gear is 1176. Well, if you look at what it says, it says compressor slash limiter. Right. It's because it's going over a 10 to 1 ratio. So if it's a if it's a two to one ratio, then that means that once once a threshold is passed, and we'll get to this in a minute, but if it goes over a certain point um and it's and it's over the it's two by two decibels, it will come out by only reducing it by one decibel. So that's got a lot of dynamic range. So basically what you need to remember, folks, is that the higher the ratio, the more squashing of the audio, to put it in just sort of a simple term, right? In other words, there's not going to be a lot of dynamic range if you're doing a 16 to 1 or a 20 to 1 or an infinity to one. Some compressors can be set to that high of a ratio. Which basically means that it's just squashing everything. Right. Everything. Cramming everything into this tight little this little dynamic range.

SPEAKER_01 17:53

And what is and effectively, what does that do to the signal when you hear it?

SPEAKER_00 17:58

It it makes it sound like there's no there's no quiet and there's no loud. So like imagine if if you were you know, I was thinking of in my mind, I'm just thinking of right now, I'm just thinking of XTC's uh song off their album Drums and Wires called Complicated Game. And and the whole thing starts where Andy Partridge is like to the right and the band's super, super quiet. But by the time you get to the end of the song, he's just like screaming about it.

unknown 18:26

Right.

SPEAKER_00 18:26

You know, saying, you know. So it's it's a it's a really cool song, but it's a huge dynamic range. What that would sound like if it was totally compressed is that all the quiet spots would sound exactly as the same loudness as when he was screaming.

SPEAKER_01 18:40

Right. I and I've listened to some some records that you know, you listen to the performance and it's so good, but it doesn't have anywhere to go.

SPEAKER_00 18:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:47

It's just stuck.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

Yeah. Right. Yeah, you're like you get to the end of the verse and you're like, I can't wait for the course to hit. This is gonna be monumental, and then it happens and you're kind of going, oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 18:57

Oh, didn't it? It's underwhelming. I think uh I I was listening to the Mars Volta uh this well this this lifetime, uh this month, this week, this year. I always listen to the Mars Volta. But uh, asthmatic as their music is, is they are the loudest and the quietest band, and they capture that so well when when you think that there's nowhere to go, yeah, they actually get there. Yeah. It's it's wild.

SPEAKER_00 19:19

Well, and classical music and film and television music um big band have a huge dynamic range. Yeah, jazz, uh bluegrass, a lot of acoustic-based music is gonna have a massive amount of inherent dynamic range. Here's the here's where you can normally do it. So, folks, you you've all been uh you've all had this phenomenon, right? You're watching a TV show and and then they break to commercial and all of a sudden you're like, holy Christ, like this, this, you know?

SPEAKER_02 19:45

Sham wow!

SPEAKER_00 19:46

You know, right? You see whatever cheesy ass commercial that's on there, you know what I mean? Um and it's really, really loud, that's because you've been sitting out for X amount of minutes in this program that has a wide range of dynamics where things can get very quiet and they can get very loud. You know, when they're sneaking around an apartment building and then all of a sudden gunfire erupts and then there's a huge car chase, that's a huge range.

SPEAKER_01 20:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:13

But when you're going in and you're being subjected to, you know, some type of big pharma ad with, you know, smiling people, and then the next one is a you know, drizzling cheese pizza being ripped in half in slow motion, and it's all and it's just the and you're going, Jesus, why can't and people started to try to come up with you remember when the TVs would auto um they would reduce it?

SPEAKER_01 20:35

Totally wrecked all kinds of settings too when you were watching stuff. But I remember watching Lost, and that was like a big thing. Yeah, because Lost was such a rangy type show. That's right. I mean, amazing. It was a medical drama, it was a cop drama, it was it was a lot of dramas. It's a little bit. But they were actually on a beat. Um but were they so uh I remember watching Lost, and that was uh one of the biggest things is like the commercials were so loud during Lost because the baseline of that show is always a little bit lower, so you could get those big swings in drama.

SPEAKER_00 21:03

Yeah, and and it it impacts us. I mean, we need to have dynamic range just to make sure that we understand the difference between something that's very heartfelt and tender and something that is needs to have a lot of volume behind it.

SPEAKER_02 21:15

Right.

SPEAKER_00 21:16

So when we overcompress something and we limit it, uh then that's exactly what we're doing. We are limiting the dynamic range, and by doing that, the s the the quiet parts sound as loud as the loud parts.

unknown 21:29

Right.

SPEAKER_00 21:30

You just homogenize everything into this just sort of experience. And that's essentially what the loudness wars were for radio in the late 90s and and you know early 2000s.

SPEAKER_01 21:40

Yeah, things got boring. Yeah, everybody's louder is not necessarily better.

SPEAKER_00 21:44

But it is because we pay attention to it. Right? We're biologically programmed, right? If someone screams, that's different than somebody goes, Hey tiger, watch out. You know what I'm saying? Right? And so we naturally uh kind of pay attention to that. And so it It it it plays into those primal wired involuntary mechanisms of how we uh divert attention.

SPEAKER_02 22:06

Right.

SPEAKER_00 22:07

You know, we know the squeaky wheel gets degrees. The quiet ones don't. Right. So that's so louder louder is better in that sense, but not uh in a long range term of of evaluating something objectively, and certainly not a long-term passage of music.

SPEAKER_01 22:23

Okay. Well so that's that's kind of like the a little bit about the history and where we are with broadcast and and and uh viewership, etc. When is a compressor used as an effect? Yeah because I have it in my guitar pedals. Yeah, I have it. I have a compressor. Yeah. Who does it makes my guitar sound cool?

SPEAKER_00 22:41

Yeah, yeah. Well, and it that's what makes the funk guitar really sit in the pocket because it's so compressed that when you s really spank the strings, it just sits there and it's like this beautiful just groove. Yeah. Um well, let's talk about what compression is. Let's talk about the the parameters of compression. Because here's the thing if you understand what compressors do, then you know how to use them more effectively. And then you have the option of being able to go, hey, you know what, I want to use this as an effect here, or I just need to tame something that is just a little bit loud. That's kind of a cool thing. Yeah. Okay. So um there are five parameters of compression. Um and yes, get the notebooks out. Ladies and gentlemen.

SPEAKER_03 23:20

Hey, man, this is a disaster club.

SPEAKER_00 23:22

I've to well, I've given a lot of these. Of course. Um you you know, you can you can look at my videos that I've done on Premier Guitar Um with my monthly column in recording dojo, or you can go to Inside Blackbird and see my whole entire master class on compression, and it gets way down into the the the weeds on that. But if you're an audio engineer, that might be something useful. If you're just a music lover, um this is still kind of fun stuff to know. Sure, yeah. Because then you can start speaking, you know, the sort of like technical ease with audio engineers and you know, see how much they know, and it's kind of a fun thing. Yeah. So amaze your friends and press your neighbors. Um okay, so there's five parameters. So I call it Takar. And Takar is basically no, it's not Conan's distance.

SPEAKER_01 24:05

It sounds like Takar the Destroyer.

SPEAKER_00 24:07

I know, right? We're going to the Castle of Kroll.

SPEAKER_01 24:10

Yeah. What was the uh the old Jack Kirby comic book that had uh I'm gonna I'm gonna forget it now. No, no, it's uh it's not Tarok. That was a dinosaur hunter.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

Kazar, maybe Kazar, anyway.

SPEAKER_01 24:27

Uh it's a car, sounds like a Jack Kirby character. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 24:30

Maybe that's the reason why I was able to kind of formulate it to begin with. But it was never really taught to me. And when I first started to understand compression, particularly as a musician and a recording engineer and and producing, I was like, I I don't understand what this is doing. Like and and to make matters worse, no two compressors have the same user interface. So imagine like you were you got a car, but they weren't in the steering wheel wasn't in the normal place, nor was the gas or the brake pedal. Sometimes it's in the trunk, sometimes it's the front of the car. You know what I mean? Like literally you can get spun around backwards in a lot of easy ways. Okay, so five parameters. Five parameters are to car. T, K, A, R, R. Now, that's our our cool comic book hero, you know, um name. Tacar. So um what does it do? Okay, well, it's I've basically outlined it in the way that a compressor works. So when an audio signal goes into a compressor, um, it has to go through these five stages, and this is the order that it works in. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:35

Is T threshold?

SPEAKER_00 25:36

T is threshold. All right. Yes, correct. Yeah. Okay. So let me let me tell you what the name what the the uh the words are um to go along with the acronym. So T threshold, as correctly surmised by Sir Patrick. Attack. And no, well you have K next. Oh yeah, yeah, it's a car. So so T, the K is knee. And I'll explain what a knee is in a minute. K-N-E-E. Yeah, just like your yeah. And then just like the joint. Then the A, which would stand for Attack. Attack. Yeah. And then you next have a uh We've mentioned it before. When we talk about 16 to 1 or 10 to 1. Ratio? Yes, ratio. Okay, so ratio's next. And then finally, the release.

SPEAKER_01 26:24

Release.

SPEAKER_00 26:25

In other words, when the compressor actually starts, stops working. Yeah. Right? Okay. So I remember teaching this at Blackbird to the to the to the students there in the academy, and none of them they were having a hard time with it. And I said, okay, here's the way I want you to think about it. And it for some reason I made it up on the fly and it worked. Like everybody remembered it. And they're like, that was the coolest way. It's never been explained though. I don't know if this anyone else will have the same experience, but I'd offer this for your adjudication. So this would be um if you want to know what the threshold is, I want you to think of it like this. The Oscars just happened, right? Right. So let's let's let's for a minute let's just think about, or it happened you know, a little while ago, but fairly recently. Um I want you to imagine that you have won the Oscar and you're making your way off stage, um, whether they kicked you off the stage or lowered the mic or you know, started playing the music and dimmed the lights. Anyway.

SPEAKER_01 27:18

Or drop the mic down in the middle of the guy talking. That was hysterical.

SPEAKER_00 27:22

That was awesome.

SPEAKER_01 27:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:23

Um it's just sort of like that's the ultimate. That's literally the mic drop.

SPEAKER_03 27:27

Yep. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 27:28

All right, well, anyway. So let's say that you've been shepherded backstage, and now what do they do? The first thing that you do after you win an Oscar, you've got to go back to the press tent. Yeah, you got interviews and everybody wants pictures and the whole thing. Okay. So you're being shepherded down this. Let's imagine that we're being shepherded down this hallway, all right? And the and the finally the guy goes, Yeah, it's just down at the end of the hallway, where we see a doorman behind some velvet ropes, and there's a closed door. And you know that the press room is is inside there. This is your threshold. So you now are the metaphorical audio signal, the Oscar-winning audio signal that is trying to get through the threshold into whatever's going on in this room. Okay. Which turns out the knee, the attack, the ratio, and the release is on the other side of this door. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 28:13

And Kevin Hart.

SPEAKER_00 28:14

And Kevin Hart. Somehow he's always there. He's always there. Never know when he's going to pop up.

SPEAKER_01 28:18

Yeah. And he can get into places.

SPEAKER_00 28:22

Right, exactly. Um love Kevin Hart. So, okay. So when you open up the door, how easily that door opens is your threshold. So if the bouncer is there and he's like, you've got to hold up your Oscar, so he's going to let you into the frickin' room.

SPEAKER_01 28:40

What a great ID.

SPEAKER_00 28:41

Right. Yeah. That's a that's a tight threshold. That's like only Oscar winners are going to get behind this door, right? So if you're an audio signal, that's like it's it's it's set very high. So that so chances of the audio getting into the compressor are not very good.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

Right.

SPEAKER_00 28:55

Right.

SPEAKER_01 28:56

Makes sense. Right.

SPEAKER_00 28:57

So if you want to get through the door, now let's say that that guy, instead of being a diligent bouncer, was like totally hammered because he's been drinking all day and so many people have, you know, come by. He didn't just care anymore, and he's passed out on a stool and the door is wide open. Well, that's a very low threshold. That means anybody can get in. Like, no form of ID, like come one, come all, block party, right? You know? Okay, that's low threshold. So the next thing that happens as soon as you get through the door. So you have a high threshold, a low threshold, or you tailor make it to anything in between, depending upon the uh the audio that you're trying to compress. As soon as you go through the door, what's next in our thing? We have tequila. We Yes. Okay. Um exactly. So think about that as being like, what's the attack time? Okay. Okay. All right. So here's what we have. Now you may go, wait, wait, wait, wait, Brian, you left out a letter, you left out K, you left out knee. Okay, I'm gonna blend this together. Because as the door is opening, the door can either open relatively like it can open as you start to walk through it almost like you don't have to break stride. That's a soft knee. Okay? That means that the audio coming into the compressor is gently let in. There's nothing that's kind of blocking it in a way. If it's got a hard knee, it's basically like the door, almost like some of those trap doors in Star Wars, when they press the button, it's like shh and it closes almost immediately, like within a microsecond. It's that fast. Um You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. So that would be a very hard knee. So that means that once the audio goes past the threshold, it it the knee it swings open really quickly. So the audio enters into the compressor full force.

SPEAKER_01 30:41

So is the attack a measurement of the knee? The amount of attack is the amount of knee, uh, is the towards harder or hor towards softer?

SPEAKER_00 30:50

It's related to the attack. It's related to the attack. So the attack time is now let's imagine that the knee was a soft knee. And so that meant that as the audio got closer to this proverbial threshold door, the door started to swing open as it started to enter. Now, once it enters into the room, which is now we're entering into the compression circuit, right? Because we've exceeded the threshold and the knee has has has eased us into the room, uh, now the attack comes in. So what could happen immediately, you mentioned tequila, would be a beautiful hostess of some sort comes up to you immediately and goes, tequila? Yes. Right? Okay. Um, or maybe they're so damn busy that you gotta just like walk around the room for a minute and just go, where the hell is the drinks? Like, I don't know, where's my tequila? Right? That whole thing. That would be a slow attack.

SPEAKER_03 31:42

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 31:42

Right? The you're you're the audio signal, you're just milling about in the room, and nothing's happened to you yet. So the idea is you need customer service. So if you want a really fast attack, someone's gonna be with you. As soon as that door opens, there's a there's a lady there standing with your tequila going, hi, welcome, congratulations on winning. Here's your tequila. Right. That's fast attack. Okay. The next part of that is the ratio. And the ratio basically says how much of an impact are you going to have on this environment? Okay, so how much of the audio is going to be affected by the compressor? Now it's working, it's gone through the threshold, it's gone past the little knee which moved seamlessly with an attack. And now the compressor is going, how much do we want to squeeze this guy?

SPEAKER_01 32:30

And this is a measure of how much paparazzi runs up to you to take your picture.

SPEAKER_00 32:34

Yeah, that's your effect. Okay. Right? It's how much it's affecting you. Yes. And and then finally, uh, you get tired of the paparazzi, and you're just like, I gotta get it the hell out of here. You're looking for the you're looking for the exit, and that's the release. Once you leave the room, you've been released.

unknown 32:48

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 32:49

So that's the cutoff. That's a very long-winded way too. But it's it's sort of like because so it's kind of a cool thing, right? And so the so to car is that threshold, knee, attack, ratio, and release.

SPEAKER_01 33:01

I know how I like my compression. Kevin Hart, easy entry, fast tequila. Get the hell out of there.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So if in that and that in that setting medium paparazzi. Medium paparazzi. I don't need the I don't need the full. Medium flash. Medium flash, right? They ask for permission. May we take your picture? Yeah. Um so like, but but like you you do that, uh, and so the that setting of the compressor at that point um is is how that audio is being treated. Well, not audio, all audio needs to be treated the same way. Like a drum set, if you're trying to compress a snare because you're drummer, you got Travis Barker on the kit, and he's whacking on that snare drum because he plays really hard and loud, and he's a great, great drummer. Uh, but um you may if you if you're in Bill Withers and you know, and it's grandma's hands or ain't no sunshine, and you're gonna and you watch how lightly they play, all the great funk records, by the way, ladies and gentlemen. Nobody was playing hard. No. Everybody's playing super tasty, yeah, right? So even Zigaboo Motelista. Oh, dude, there's so many.

SPEAKER_01 34:09

You know, he was playing like Ringo Star, and you don't even realize it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:11

Well, I mean, you just think about even like Big Payback from James Brown. Yeah, you know, that's an angry, skanky ass tune. I love that. That's got such a just dirty juju on that. Um but like that's our next album. Dirty dude, juju. It's got some takar on it. Yeah, it's got some takar on it. No, well, that's the thing, but nobody's really playing that loud. Right. Okay, so so you wouldn't want to compress your vocals in the same way that you want to compress your guitar. That's it.

SPEAKER_01 34:39

The question I was getting to, um, I guess that's kind of the next part of the conversation, is how is how is it used on different pieces of recording as opposed to just the overall mix or the overall effects that you're uh compressing? So I that was that was definitely a big part. I keep asking that because again, I have a compressor on my guitar pedal. Yeah. On my guitar pedal board. Don't really know how it works, but I know what it does when the knobs get turned. Yeah. You know?

SPEAKER_00 35:04

Yeah. Okay. So two things. One, we remember how I was saying you can get easily turned around in compressor land because they're all designed differently. Well, here's the here's the weird thing that leads to this confusion. A lot of times when you look at a compressor and you're starting to try to figure out how it's designed, the circuit may not give you access to all five controls. At once. In other words, or at all. Ever. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 35:28

Like you just don't have it. So you might be getting the K in the double in the second R.

SPEAKER_00 35:32

Yeah, like for example, you you typically will set a threshold. That's pretty much universal in almost every compressor, regardless of decade and maker.

SPEAKER_02 35:41

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 35:42

Um but you don't chances are, depending upon how the circuit's designed, which could be an optical circuit, it could be a dual-bridge xenodiode, xenodiode, um, it could be um totally tube-based, it could be solid state, um, which can work in microseconds. Um there's all kinds of different compressor designs.

SPEAKER_01 36:01

And no one is better than the other. They just do different things. We have our favorites. We have our favorites. We have our favorites. I guess.

SPEAKER_00 36:06

You know what I mean? It's like, all right. So um, but you know, um so yes, you're right. Um in that sense, it's the wizard not the wand, right? It's how you use the compressor that makes it so cool. But the com but once you know that, um, you don't necessarily have all five parameters at your disposal. So you may work on a tube-based compressor, like a classic one's an LA2A, which is based off the gate stay level, which comes right out of the radio days, right? Of of releasing a signal off of a transmitter tower and putting it out into the wild.

SPEAKER_01 36:38

Um I think they have an LA2A guitar compressor pedal. Right. Okay, so they make one, right? They do. Okay, I think they have that one. Yeah, universal audio makes it. Yeah, universal audio. I have a Chile one, too.

SPEAKER_00 36:48

But the LA2A is a tube-based. Yeah. Uh man, you want to talk about expensive? I mean, they're like six grand now for a rack unit.

SPEAKER_01 36:55

Oh yeah, I've seen them sold.

SPEAKER_00 36:56

And the vintage ones are 20, you know, plus, depending upon which one you get.

SPEAKER_01 37:00

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And the they're hard to get. Like even the new ones, they're only making a few every month or whatever, so you really rarely even see them.

SPEAKER_00 37:07

And that's vacuum tubes and all and then they've recreated the original circuit design. On that one, um, it because it's an optical-based uh um compressor, you don't have control over the knee, you don't have control over the attack, or the ratio, or the release. You just basically can let signal into it like a threshold, and then after that you have a makeup gain. Right. So let's talk about this. Remember when we were talking about.

SPEAKER_01 37:34

We'll link it in the show notes. Every compressor that we talk about today will link in the show notes. Yeah. So people can go and you can look shop, you know. Yeah, you can shop, yeah. Great.

SPEAKER_00 37:42

And the you know, the plugins um uh are as good, especially universal audios, um, they are as good as the real the real ones. And uh, and believe me, I've worked on all of them for years.

SPEAKER_01 37:54

Is it does it not have that one percent difference? Not anymore. That people chase because I was always told that plug-in compressors and a lot of effects that have a an outboard counterpart, that you're always gonna be off by like up to one percent, and it's that one percent that all the engineers and producers are chasing.

SPEAKER_00 38:13

Yeah, I totally disagree. Is that is that a myth? I totally disagree. Yeah. Uh but it's it's it is a myth. Yeah. It's a gear sluts myth. Yeah. Because most of those guys n didn't have multiple units that they could compare to. I had the good fortune of being at Blackbird for eight and a half years. All the greatest gear in the world is at Blackbird. And it wasn't one of it. I mean, most studios might have one or two. Blackbird had dozens or more. And I got to go know all of those. And and sometimes I would bring them home on the weekend and bring them here and just listen to two different units side by side, even consecutive serial numbers, and they didn't sound the same.

SPEAKER_01 38:49

And you know what's crazy is the ones at Blackbird is like they have such a history now. You have ones that the smashing pumpkins have used on guitars, and you have like it's just it's just crazy. What a what a catalog there.

SPEAKER_00 39:00

Yeah. Oh man, I mean, it's uh, you know, it's still the greatest studio in the world, uh, period. I think so. Um there's great studio. This one's pretty good. I like this one. I like mine. This is like minimal this is kind of like the Millennium Falcon for me. Yeah. Yeah. It's very comfortable. You know, sometimes you gotta elbow it and it gets but it works, but I I got it, I got it where it counts.

SPEAKER_01 39:17

But you know where to elbow it. That's the truth. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 39:19

It's right. But but to get back to that, um I can't tell the difference anymore. In the early days, 15 years ago, um, you know, almost 20 years ago, uh, you could tell the difference between a Waves 1176 plug-in and the digital just got that c that much better. It's so good now.

SPEAKER_01 39:38

You know, I remember there was a time, you know, when I was coming up as a guitar player that we looked at digital effects as garbage. We were like, it's gotta be analog. Yes. It's gotta be uh, you know, uh uh the a tube screamer and uh a DD6 or D D7, whatever it is that you were using. Um but now it's just totally not the case anymore. It's it's actually more efficient.

SPEAKER_00 40:01

Aaron Ross Powell It's more efficient uh and really more reliable because I've had you know Fairchild 670s, which is a holy grail compressor. Yeah. Uh this is a 67-pound uh compressor that weren't very you know made very many of them. And we should do a whole episode on the Fairchild, it's fantastic.

SPEAKER_02 40:19

We will.

SPEAKER_00 40:20

But this is a $500,000 compressor.

unknown 40:23

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 40:24

And I've had it bite me in the ass.

SPEAKER_01 40:26

Why? Why is it a half million dollars?

SPEAKER_00 40:27

Well, we'll it's another. But that's been modeled by pretty much anybody that's starting to make compressor or you know, plugins that were compressor-based. They've all wanted model a 670 compressor.

SPEAKER_01 40:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 40:40

And it's sort of like, well, which 670 are you modeling? It's it's the same way with guitars. It's like no two Les Pauls sound identical. You know, not every 59 Les Paul, ladies and gentlemen, is worth a million and a half to two million bucks. Well, it is on the marketplace, but I'm saying they don't sound the same. Yeah. They don't sound the same.

SPEAKER_01 41:00

Every single one sounds the same.

SPEAKER_00 41:02

Some have more magic. You can find a 60 that sounds better than a 59, or a 58 that sounds better than a 59. I've I've personally can attest to that.

SPEAKER_01 41:09

Yeah, we I mean we can do we will do several episodes on guitars in general. Yes. Um, but you know, in that era, the mid-50s to like 1970, every single guitar that came off the line of Gibson was a different guitar. It just felt like every single one of them either sounded different, played different, looked different, etc.

SPEAKER_00 41:28

And Martin's were the same way, particularly when you got post-war years. Not to definitely be.

SPEAKER_01 41:36

Oh, yeah, the post-CBS yeah. Yeah, up to 1963, kind of into 65 because they were still using old parts. But in 1965, that definitely changed Fender, though early when Fenders were just so nasty.

unknown 41:47

Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:47

So nasty.

SPEAKER_00 41:48

Yeah, I mean, for me, yeah. Just you know, for what it's worth, um, you know, for me, 1960 is like my favorite year for Fender. We're gonna cross the board.

SPEAKER_01 41:58

Way off.

SPEAKER_00 41:59

I know we are. We're gonna get way off on Fenders. But when we get oh dude, yes, I look forward to that. But like, but honestly, maybe we'll bring Joe or somebody, Joe Glazer or someone. Oh, you can rate. Yeah. But anyway, so um so back to compressors, uh, when you're dealing with all of that, you may not have control over all five parameters. This is where we got off to. This is where we jumped off. Yeah. I'm bringing this back, I'm landing the plane. So um so essentially you may not have control over all five. So you need to know, well, what's the circuit? What am I what am I dealing with? What do I have control of? So because of that, if you don't have control over the attack and the ratio and the release times, then and you're using a slow optical-based compression um type of circuit, drums are probably not gonna be a good choice for you. You need something that's gonna be able to interact much more quickly. Now, that brings us to what we talked about at the beginning of the show that we said we were gonna talk about, which is this. And it's totally related to compression, which is ADSR. Attack, decay, sustain, and release. Now, these are not parameters of of compression per se. This is what happens to any source of audio that exists on planet Earth. Right? So um, you know, when I snap my finger, that had an attack, a decay, a sustain, and release. Can you it just happened so fast that it sounded very, very just like momentary, you know, just like that was it, right? Yeah. But um the same thing, that exact same envelope is what we call it, uh, is what can you apply to if you stroked uh, you know, you strummed a guitar, or you hit a note on the piano, or you smacked the snare drum, it's all got this attack, and then it has a very slight decay, and then there's a steady state point of of a sustain and then a release of the sound. It could be in microseconds or it could be really long.

SPEAKER_01 43:47

That's exactly what I was gonna ask you.

SPEAKER_00 43:48

So yeah, okay, cool. So it's an it totally depends on the sound source itself. Well, you gotta remember when that audio information goes into a compressor, we need to tell the compressor, hey, this is a Quick sounding waveform that's coming in and it's past the threshold, so we want you to work on it. So if you had a snare drum and somebody was hitting a snare drum and you had a very slow attack, uh the snare drum's gonna be come and gone out of the room before anybody goes, Where I got his drink, where is he? Right? The paparazzi comes and you're not there. You've already left. If you do you pulled a you know a full Sean Penn. Right. You know? So so that's kind of the idea uh of it. So you need to be able to tell the compressor what program material you're putting into it.

SPEAKER_01 44:35

Fascinating. That all of that makes I like I'm totally like seeing it now. Like I'm seeing the waveforms in my head and what it's doing. Yeah. When you control those different things, there's an art to it.

SPEAKER_00 44:44

So as we get more experience as engineers, we not only can you start to hear compression, because compression is hard to hear. It's based uh it's based on how the ear perceives loudness over time. This is not a math equation. It's it's sort of like it it has everything to do with context and the physical passage of time as how our ears regulate what's loud and what's soft. And we talked about that in a little bit in the last show when I mentioned threshold shift and we started getting into loud decibel levels on what's painful, what's not, right? That kind of thing. Um why we get tinnitus and the ringing in our ears, right? Our ears are are not great judges at decibels exactly. Right.

SPEAKER_01 45:24

You know, it is and it is the one thing that you as a human and your senses use to measure those things.

SPEAKER_00 45:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:31

Yeah. But we can't measure in a quantitative way. Correct. Right?

SPEAKER_01 45:34

But we know.

SPEAKER_00 45:35

Yeah. Yeah. Right. And right. We need to use.

SPEAKER_01 45:37

We've all been in a concert where your whole body is rattling.

SPEAKER_00 45:40

Totally.

SPEAKER_01 45:40

You know? Yeah. And you've left a concert with your ears ringing. So most people, I hope most people have had that experience. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 45:48

Um, totally true.

SPEAKER_01 45:50

I remember uh going to a bass boss demo for the first time and not under and not thinking about loudness and what it's doing to my ears or whatever. And I just remember going into that room and the bass was so low that you could you heard it, but it felt like my soul was escaping my body. Yeah. And then once it started coming back, then my soul came. I felt like at one point I was looking at myself. Interesting. Listening to the speakers.

SPEAKER_00 46:11

Ah, that's wow. That's wild. I love that. Transportative. Yeah. Um transportative. Transportative. Yeah, we'd have to look that up. Anyway. I'll take you there. I'm gonna make a word if it's one of those two.

SPEAKER_01 46:22

But generally transportative.

SPEAKER_00 46:24

Transportative. Transportative. Well, so yeah. So as we get into that, um it that's what the that's what we have to program our compressors to be able to do, right? And ADSR is is another whole point. That's how synthesizers work. They you you you have an oscillator, it makes a noise, and then you start uh putting an envelope on it with an attack and a decay and a sustain and release, and based on how you set those parameters and you mix other cool elements in there, you start to get these cool, swimmy, beautiful synth sounds. And we'll have a whole episode on synths. But getting back to compression, so let's now we know how compressors work. Let's talk about something that if you're still with us, you then um you're gonna really wanna check this part out, which is the loudness wars, right? How does compression get applied to an overall mix, in other words, an entire song as opposed to individual instruments or musical elements within it, how does it get because do they compress it at the end? Yeah, they do, totally. And it got to the point where if you look at, if if any of you have ever done this, um, where you drag in a file, uh an audio that you own, audio file that you own, you know, say it's a say it's a Doobie Brothers tune, you know, like maybe minute by minute, all right, and then you bring in a Blink 182 song, or you bring in, God forbid, one of the tracks off of Death Magnetic from Metallica. I love the album's good. It got such a bad thing because it causes ear fatigue, because that's the winner of the Loudness Wars, turns out, is is Death Magnetic. There's no album that is compressed more heavily.

SPEAKER_01 48:02

It's kind of a winner and a loser in a lot of ways. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:04

And and and Andrew Sheps, you know, said this as well. He's like, I won that war. You know. And it wasn't a war that he was really wanting to fight. He was conscripted into it because that was what the label was demanding in the band and also the the zeitgeist at the time, which was louder is better.

SPEAKER_01 48:19

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So Death Magnetic is technically the loudest record.

SPEAKER_00 48:23

There's so much compression uh in on that and limiting on that particular album that there is inter-sample modulation happening. And that is insanity. So this was digital limiting gone crazy. Wow. Yeah. So um, you know.

SPEAKER_01 48:40

So is that that was the moment where like collectively, the entire engineering and producing community said, guys, enough. We gotta back off a little bit. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:50

It's starting to sound like everybody was running the the flag up the flagpole, but no one was paying attention because they were getting away with it. And they're like, oh no, and hold on. You know, this Blink 182. I mean, Chris Lord Algae was, you know, as as great as he is, um, he was a a very central driver for that because his mixes were really, really loud and very compressed. This is all the Blink 182, some 41.

SPEAKER_01 49:14

The use record we listened to.

SPEAKER_00 49:15

Yeah, exactly. I mean, you can just go back and look Chris Lord Algae and you can see the fantastic records that he's done. Yeah. Um, but you'll also be in for a loud ride.

SPEAKER_01 49:24

Well, there's a very interesting intersection there in the timeline, right? Because about then is when record sales were starting to really sharply decline and the advent of streaming was was starting well, maybe probably more of the peer-to-peer was starting to happen and Apple Music was getting and starting to kind of take over catalogs. Yeah. So is there any kind of association with that?

SPEAKER_00 49:47

I mean, is there a lot of uh a little bit. Yeah. A little bit.

SPEAKER_01 49:52

Because everybody had to change the way they were engineered, people started changing the way they were engineering records, right?

SPEAKER_00 49:56

Yeah. Yeah, they did. And and we went we went from mastering records in an analog with analog gear and using uh loudness curves that were really meant for vinyl to moving over exclusively exclusively into digital. And when we got into digital, we started to realize that the, hey, there's untapped headroom here. We can push it up to absolute zero, you know, and not go over and not distort. This is what caused the loud wars, the loudness wars, which was us transf trans um migrating from analog gear to digital gear, especially when it came time for mastering and limiting. And so they figured out, oh, we can make our our you know, our song two and a half dBs louder than our competitor. And so then everybody started to push up against this absolute zero, but they couldn't go over because if you got over, then you're gonna run into problems. And this is sort of where Death Magic was.

SPEAKER_01 50:53

And I think before they even understood they were getting to that point, I remember the advent of the MP3, and they were trying to make the files as small as possible. Right. Yeah. And then not so on top of all of that, you're further compressing just the entire track down. And you so you were taking out pieces of songs that were inaudible anymore. Like you were listed in the MP3 and you were missing guitar parts, you know, that were just disappeared. You know?

SPEAKER_00 51:18

Well, or or what ended up.

SPEAKER_01 51:20

Or it would be inaudible, like you know.

SPEAKER_00 51:22

Yeah, I think what ends up happening with the MP3, because if you guys have ever wondered about like what's the difference between a wave forum and an MP3 and MP4 and you know, there's a lot of other formats that are, you know, Augvorbus and some of the others. What are these formats? What are they doing? Well, it's a it's a it's a compression way, but in this sense, we're talking about data compression, not audio compression. Right. And so when you're talking about data, what ends up happening is they started to figure out this stemmed from obviously um the the film industry because at the time they're making these DVDs and they're like, holy crap, our audio is taking up a significant portion, and we need to reserve that for the visuals. And so they started to come up with these different um sort of formats to be able to compress audio to the point where it felt like it was totally awesome and we couldn't tell the difference, but we shrank it. So an MP3 is one-tenth the size of a normal WAV file. Right?

SPEAKER_03 52:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:22

And and you know, you can hear it. Um I can hear it.

SPEAKER_01 52:25

I can definitely hear it.

SPEAKER_00 52:26

Um but most people don't because they're listening on earbuds or they're listening in their car and there's a lot of ambient noise around. They're not listening in critical listening environments.

SPEAKER_01 52:34

Well, the thing is like are we are we trying to find it the difference? Like we are. Yeah, I mean yeah. The regular listener isn't.

SPEAKER_00 52:40

Well, it's it's it's ironic, you know, because here, you know, you you might spend $150,000 on making a record, and that's chom change compared to what it was in the 70s. But like you spend 150K, that is a major amount of money in today's market to spend on a record, and you might want to record to tape, you might want to use you know analog consoles like like we have behind us, um, or whatever. And then you get it all done, you get it mastered on uh great gear, and then what happens next is what's gonna happen next is you're gonna basically have that I totally lost my train of thought. That's falling. That's why.

SPEAKER_01 53:19

I know that I I like over a period of time, I was like, yeah, yeah, that microphone went really far down. Give it a good card. It's cool. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 53:27

Okay. So um where were we? Oh, so um so basically what ends up happening is you spend all this money using all this great outboard analog gear, tube amps, tube microphones, you do all this other stuff, and you have this amazing sound and you record it at 192 kilohertz, you know, 32-bit floating point, which basically has the dynamic range that would cause you to die. It's like 148 decibels theoretically, that it could that could do that. Is a huge dynamic range. Reference episode three, Krakatoa, if you're not sure what that is. But you know what I'm saying? Yeah. So, like, holy shit, they're doing all this amazing stuff, you're spending all this money on it, and then you get it mastered, and then what's this deliverable? It's going to some service that's gonna present it and push it out to their listening in uh MP3. Right. Like, what did we just do? You know?

SPEAKER_01 54:21

And I think people have gotten hip to that too. I think that has affected the industry of record production, how much can people put out? I mean, you can put out a you make a great record at home. You know, if it's gonna be put out on that kind of format, it's like you don't need to go as deep.

SPEAKER_00 54:35

Yeah, yeah, 100%. But you know, um no value judgment on it. I mean, in the sense of what's right or wrong. It's just like if if you're moved by a piece of music, it doesn't really matter how you recorded it. But there are people that really want to get the best quality. To me, it's sort of like if you if you went out and you saved up your ducats and you're like, I'm gonna buy, you know, this Lamborghini, you know, or Ferrari, whatever, right? And pick your favorite model. I'm gonna I'm gonna use the Enzo. You you buy a Ferrari Ferrari Enzo for 6.5 million or something. And then what do you use it for? You just basically use it as a golf cart and you just drive on the fairways just to go from hole to hole, right? That's essentially what's happening in an audio way. You know what I mean? It's like, holy shit, it's capable of so much more. So, yeah, that's essentially what started this, these loudness wars, and people, it got super, super competitive. So, Death Magnetic. Let's just kind of like, you know, just give homage to Death Magnetic. The record for Metallica, Death Magnetic, I think, is a solid record from from Metallica. I just can't listen to it because it hurts my ears after a while. It's so granulated that I just it just doesn't feel real to me. It's just, it's almost like pixelated in a way, for lack of a better word. Like you're not seeing things in beautiful high death. It's just totally granular and pixelated. That's what it feels like to me, and it's really loud. Um so for those of you who who want to have a at-home test, I would say do the following thing. Go ahead and go pick out, like, let's do What a Fool Believes from uh the Doobie Brothers. Um, or do Hotel California from the Eagles. Just the single, you don't have to do the whole album. And then listen to it for like 30, 45 seconds, and then go and get a blink one in 82 song, like All the Small Things or What's My Age Again, and listen to it. Don't adjust your volume at all. Just listen to them back to back, and you'll get an idea of what I'm talking about with loudness wars. Because the Dewey Brothers are going to be much more quiet. And and and but here's the weird thing. If you want to turn it up and you want to listen to it really loud, you can, and it won't tire out your ears. Why? Because there's dynamic range. There is quiet and loud. When you try to do the same thing and you turn up a Blink 182 record, you're gonna get tired after about two or three songs. Your ears are gonna be like, wow man, I'm just feel like a little tired in my ears.

SPEAKER_01 57:01

And I've noticed that before. I never really knew why, and now I do.

SPEAKER_00 57:06

That's it.

SPEAKER_01 57:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 57:08

Maybe we should take a listen to some uh some of the death magnetic record.

SPEAKER_00 57:11

Okay. All right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 57:14

Uh so really uh, you know, it's been an interesting episode. I've learned a lot. I have a lot of notes uh about compression limiting. Really, when I think that one of the things that uh, like you were saying, the ear fatigue, right? Or going to a concert and it's loud and you hear that ringing, or a volcano erupts and kills everybody in its path. Um ultimately it's like, what do we how do you protect your ears from those moments where, oh sh, you know, you turned your radio, it was really loud because you were cranking the doobie brothers, and then you turned your cover on and Death Magnetic was in the rotation, it just blows out your ears. There's a lot of things, very delicate instrument that you're dealing with. Um and I've had my fair share of ear issues uh throughout my life. Right. Um so I'm very uh keenly aware and um of protecting my ears. I always wear my ear on my keys, I have earplugs. Yeah. Um what are what are some tips? Maybe maybe that's just the cut the the conversation that we end the show with is uh what are you know some things that you can do to protect your ears?

unknown 58:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:17

Ladies and gentlemen, the keys to This is not medical advice. So we are not qualified, we are not doctors, even though we play one on TV. Um yes, you you b the best gift that you can give you, your spouse, your children, is a trip to the audiologist and get in ear molds made of your ear. Because from there, you can actually order um uh fitting, perfectly fitting uh ear molds that will reduce full bandwidth will reduce the decibel levels of your environment. This is totally different from like going into the bathroom and wetting some you know tissue and then jamming it down in your ears.

SPEAKER_01 59:00

Um I do not recommend that.

SPEAKER_00 59:03

Well, that just makes you feel like you do when you have a head cold. Right. You know, right? Everything's just plugged, you can't hear the high tssss and the sizzles and the whole bandwidth that we're used to hearing. But when you get filters and you have in-ear molds, you you pop in these filters and you can literally order sets of filters like, oh, this is a 25 dB reduction, this is a 10 decibel reduction, and so on and so forth, and you can just pop them in and out or leave them in and then just have them on you. So anytime you go to a concert or you're around a loud environment, maybe you go to the shooting range, or you're around, you know, uh fireworks, or anything that's loud, uh ambient noise loud in a restaurant, whatever it is, you pop them in.

SPEAKER_01 59:44

Um I think people would be surprised of how much dangerous audio there is just in everyday life when you're walking around.

SPEAKER_00 59:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 59:51

You don't even think about it, you know?

SPEAKER_00 59:52

Aaron Powell But but you know the other thing is, I mean, now because you have like, you know, you have your airb your airpods and everything else um that have noise reduction in them, and it'll alert you and say you're in an unsafe environment, you know, for sustained um activity. You know, you don't want to do this, you can hurt your ears. But if anything else, put your earbuds in and just just have it do that and just have noise cancellation. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:18

And all of you I've definitely used them for that before.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:21

Because when things are loud, we get confused. Yeah. It is it is a traumatic experience for us. There's a reason why when you're lost and you're driving your car, what's the first thing you do? Turn the radio down. Exactly right. Right. Yeah. Or you tell everybody else in the back, shut up. Everybody, shut up. Yeah. Right? Hold on a second, right? I gotta think. It's hard to think when people are screaming or there's lots of ambient noise. So um, so having some way to quiet it down will help. You can also hear things better in a way when it's when it's in a much more tolerable range. So if you go to a loud concert and it's just off the chain volume-wise, you put these in and you're gonna enjoy the show, and then when you pop out, you're gonna notice that everybody around you is screaming. Yeah. Right? When they're trying to talk to each other. Because they've got total threshold shift going on, and they're just, you know, that's that's normal volume for them. And you're just like, wow, this is crazy. But but then you can just you can put them in. So um, yeah, so we do that. I have mine on me every and I anytime I know I'm going out or whatever, I just pop them in my pocket and I've got them on my person. If you, if you and they're not expensive, um, you know, they might be 50 bucks, you can get them for less. Sometimes you if you want to spend more, you can. Um, but you can also just keep them in your car or your work vehicle. If you're around something that constantly subjects you to something loud, uh you work construction or you do something along those lines, you just keep them in your car, or hang them from your mirror, whatever. And then every day you go to work, boom, put your earplugs in, you're ready to rock and roll. And you're not plugging your ears, so it's not like people can't talk to you. It's just gonna reduce everything down to a normal volume. It'll help your stress level, um, and it will also help your concentration.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:02

Yeah. Uh you're born with it, you can lose it. Yes, and it's very hard to fix. Yeah. Like it's one of those things that once it's gone, it's kind of gone. There's not a lot of things that can give it back to you.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:15

That's right. The the the inner working of the ear, and this would be a good subject for a podcast too, is just like bring in an audiologist and have them talk about you know audio health and in the sense of ear hearing health and how you can protect it. But what's going on inside your little tiny ears is so miraculous. And it just like the eyeball is. I mean, there's so many things about our bodies that are so fascinating. Um, but yeah, the hammer and the stirrup and the anvil and the inner part of the cochlea and the scilla, that you know, the little tiny hairs that stand on end, you know, like when you get goosebumps. And when you when you blast through that, it's like it's like scalping the Brazilian rainforest. It's just you go in and clear-cut it, those trees don't grow back. And that hair inside your ear, not talking about the outside of your ear, when you get hair on the outside, we're talking about the inner ear. Um, that that little bit right there is uh it doesn't grow back, and when those go away, you start getting tinnitus or tinnitus, however you want to say it, tomato tomato. And you can get um a lot of other inner ear problems, balance, mener's disease. We have these little crystals inside of our ears, and when those crystals break off, you can get vertigo instantly. It's happened to me.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:24

Wow. Yeah. When did that happen?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:26

Um it happened about it happened about 10 years ago. I was dry, I was down at the end of my street. I was my kids and I were going out to lunch. It was a Saturday morning, and I at that time they were little, you know, six and eight. Uh and and I would take them to the bookstore and we go get a like a Thomas train and we go hang out and you know, just eat Mexican food and do our and we were on our way. And I just turned right onto Concord Road, which is a larger street with more traffic. And as soon as I turned right, one of these little crystals broke off in my ear, and my whole world just started spinning the to the point where I I didn't know I didn't know if I was on the road or not. And I immediately pulled over and just sat there. And my kids were back, you know, they're all harnessed up in their car seats, and they're like, Yeah, what's wrong? And I'm like, I don't know. And I didn't know if I was having a stroke. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:11

There's like, what are you how do you know?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:12

An aneurysm. Like, I didn't know. I I was so freaked out. And I was just like, I just sit there and the whole world was hard spinning. Not like drunk, not like anything else. This was like the the world, the the galaxy was moving, it was that heavy. And finally it calmed down after about 10 minutes, and it was getting, I was getting really nauseous. And then I called my mom and I was like, what's going on? You know, have you has this ever happened to me? And she's like, Yeah, this this is it happens to people sometimes. But there's these little crystals that break off.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:42

Yeah, it's amazing how much of the your equilibrium is dictated by your hearing. 100%. Everything that goes on in there.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:48

So yeah, it's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:49

Well, thanks for sharing. Likewise. Uh thank you for all of the notes. Yeah. This is a really interesting conversation today. I'm looking forward to the next one. And we'll uh catch them in a week. Yeah, catch you in a week.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:59

See you in the next one.