It is 'peak normalised', but the peaks are the sound made by Pete's chair being pulled across the floor as he changed his position between songs. Songs themselves are almost inaudible.

Too classic. I love it.

Dvorak's 'New World' symphony is one of my favourites I cannot listen to in the car without frequent volume adjustments.

Your point about the car being a bad environment for listening to highly dynamic music is a good one. It makes me rethink my position on Dynamat. Originally, my opinion was that it was a waste of time and money: It's easier and cheaper to buy more powerful amps and speakers than it is to strip down your interior and apply Dynamat. Now I'm not so sure. Highly dynamic music can be a big issue in a noisy car, no matter how loud your system can crank. It's too bad that car noise supression is always such a trade-off (weight/cost vs. supression).

The funny thing is that radio stations have known about this for many years. When you listen to the radio, all that music has been run through a compressor before it's broadcast. They do it because they know that people mostly listen to the radio in their cars, and that they need to compress the dynamics for that environment.

And then there's the issue of television broadcasts. Everyone always complains because the commercials are so much louder than the TV shows. Actually, the comercials aren't louder, they're just more dynamically compressed than the shows are. Some new TV's come with a DSP that does compression/limiting to take care of that problem for you. It's funny how something we dislike about television broadcasts becomes desirable in the car.

So, what do we do? Does anybody know of a 'compressor' for wav files?

Of course. It's easy to compress the dynamics of a .WAV file before encoding it into .MP3. Cool Edit has a very nice compression interface. Although in my version (96), it's tricky to adjust the parameters correctly. There's no preset just for making a CD sound louder-- The presets assume you're working with one voice or one instrument rather than an entire album. So unless you adjust the parameters carefully, you'll get artifacts such as zipper effects and snare drums that sound gated. Like I said, good compression is an art form all by itself.

There's no way to compress the dynamics an MP3 after it's been encoded, of course...

Maybe we should put real-time dynamics compression using empeg's DSP on the wish list?

As I recall, someone already brought that up. But I've read the specs on the DSP, and if I remember correctly, it doesn't include a compressor. Any dynamics compression would have to be done realtime by the Empeg player software. So don't hold your breath.



Tony Fabris
Empeg #144