Well, perhaps you are generalising a bit too much Paul. In my experience, the so-called 'dance scene' seems to be amongst the most progressive and enlightened about the whole over-compression issue *just judging from my own experience mind*, and seeing as you know at least some of the music I like, you'll have a fair guess what I'm basing my judgement on!
(I also notice that jazz records to tend to have exquisitely subtle compression compared to chart stuff.) For instance, whoever's familiar with the R&S back catalogue will remember that virtually all that label's records and CDs could often seem bafflingly 'quiet' - even right up to the final releases of the late '90s-early 2000s. In fact of course, rather than negligence, this was a case of a label making a conscious decision to keep as much of the original dynamics of the tracks as possible, by not engaging in more compression than was strictly necessary. It was a good decision in my view. And as I say, from what I can see, it's one which a lot of small 'electronic music' labels seem to make too. (I haven't heard any of the recent R&S represses so I can't speak for those.) I could also cite the mp3s and FLACs from bleep.com as apparently being reproduced from more tastefully-compressed masters than the norm, it seems to me. Ken -----Original Message----- From: punkdISCO [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 30 January 2007 18:29 To: 313@hyperreal.org Subject: RE: (313) Carl Craig :: The Workout "look at early theo parrish records in a wav editor. the peaks of the kicks will be hitting at 0 and the rest will be at -25dB or some ridiculous nonsense like that" At the danger of over simplifying things, DJs are probably the biggest single culprits for the loss of dynamics in today's music. Its DJs who don't play the quieter tracks. Its DJs that will play a heavily compressed (loud) track on the club's PA at level 10, leaving no scope to then turn up the next quieter track. Etc.. Okay, this is really generalising but hey, it's not too far from the truth... Ta, Paul London www.punkdisco.co.uk www.punkdisco.co.uk/Music/Wot.mp3 - New annoying track www.myspace.com/punkdisco - Zero content, more pictures