Should I compress recorded mixes?

[JAC]

- Dynamic room compression - this is using a audio compressor to squash the volume level of the track making the quieter parts louder.


Theres no need to do compression if your mix was any good in the first place. The tunes that are being played have already been highly highly compressed in the first place. Basicly a mastering engineer will sit there and compress it as much as he can without without getting any percieved loss of quality on really expensive gear. If you come back with your cheap digital compressor and compress the signal more it is VERY easy to be able squash the track even more and start adding in all sorts of audio artifacts.

That's exactly the feeling I had, any more compression, especially done with such cheap tools, is more likely to wreck the sound quality of your mix rather than improve it. I guess a little compression wouldn't hurt in order to keep the volumes consistent.

Oh and Jesc, great idea with the cd's in the car, pity I don't have one! Might do the same on my bike though, or maybe the bus.......

[pepehouse]

What I apply is a limiter to prevent clipping and get more loudness, sounds good.

[feralchimp]

Theres no need to do compression if your mix was any good in the first place.

Seconded. This is a lot harder to get right when mixing from vinyl with monitors blasting away in the room, but crunching the whole signal down is a pretty ham-fisted way to go about fixing levels on 5-10% of a mix.

[BentoSan]

crunching the whole signal down is a pretty ham-fisted way to go about fixing levels on 5-10% of a mix.

Totally agree, some volume automation would be much better for fixing up those parts of the mix.