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Compression does not "destroy" the sound in most use cases. Without compression, we wouldn't have the classic sounds of Pink Floyd, the Beatles, or literally any other major band of the last 70 years. It changes the character of the sound, yes--duh, that's also what EQ, delay, reverb, and literally every other effect out there does. It's incredibly useful as a mix tool--without it, you wouldn't be able to hear half of most vocalists in most music. The instruments would simply drown them out, even if they themselves were uncompressed. To throw away compression completely is asinine. Heck, distortion and overdrive are just extreme compression. Without those, say goodbye to electric guitars, among other things. Enjoy your trip into theoretical la-la land: without compression, modern music sounds terrible (and 99.99% of listeners will agree). I'll be over here getting paid to do the job correctly, like I have been for years.

SEE?! That's what I'm talking about!

You'll find this is mostly the case with older music as well (that isn't a re-release and in all likelihood remastered). We pretty much have calibrated our amps for heavily compressed music. Some stuff I can barely even crank up above the lowest settings because it gets unbearably loud beyond that. This is also because compression also introduces inharmonic distortion. It manifests all over the frequency spectrum unlike harmonic distortion which just stacks overtones and is thus "musical", so it is something that is much harder to quantify for most people. All you really know is that it sounds like crap. Inharmonic distortion (AKA intermodulation distortion) is something that always exists when you mix more than two tones. It's just a matter of keeping it at negligible levels. Compressing the master will increase this distortion, so if you play it louder you'll notice it more. This also means that uncompressed music can be played at even louder average volume and still sound very pleasant and palatable. This is pretty much how I was taught that the best general benchmark for technical audio quality is how loud you can play something before it gets unbearable. Dynamic music invites you to play it louder. Brickwalled music does the opposite. I think in particular music released in the latter half of the 80's does an excellent job at utilizing full dynamic range, and this is when the overall technical quality peaked in mainstream music. Digital audio was still new enough at that point to be considered novel and this utopian ideal which has finally been realized, so producers made sure to take advantage of its perks. After a while, the situation normalized and people started to regard pristine, digital audio as something mundane, which also played its part in contributing towards the loudness war with very romantisized notions of processing/mastering (also related to mastering engineers needing to justify keeping their jobs when vinyl was being phased out for CDs. Unlike vinyl mastering which is a very specialized and delicate process, getting audio on CD format is just a simple linear transfer of binary information).

You can not mix without compression. Even relatively acoustic music uses compression on the elements to make them stand out more. Compression does not "cut sound quality". It's not signal representation compression (bit/sample reduction), it's peak compression (modifying amplitude per threshold cross). Amplitude modulation doesn't degrade information. You can uncompress a signal if you painstakingly do the math (there aren't many tools that do this because the math is obnoxious). If information is not lost, you are not cutting sound quality. Btw, Timaeus, you asked this earlier; gain reduction corresponds to ratio, they are different representations of the same thing. Ratio is what you set as the ratio you want to drop, gain reduction tells you the actual dB dropped as a result of the application of that ratio (basically just converting that ratio over to a dB value per a specific loudness over the threshold). That's what those meters are (like the big center one in TLs). GR is not a parameter you can adjust directly, it's a description of the end effect, but you can check how much GR your ratio is applying and appropriately adjust your ratio to change the GR. I suppose crudely speaking, if you lowered the threshold, it also increases your GR because the ratio applies to more signal. So in that case, it's actually both; a general descriptor of the "total effect" your compressor is doing.

https://soundcloud.com/katallen-12/zeliard-hotel-satono Let me first say that I have no idea what the hell I've done. Boredom + Midi Keyboard + Zeliard soundtrack, I suppose. This was literally the first thing that came to mind upon hearing Zeliard's "Satono Town" track.. I'm not sure if it's even worth pursuing(or if I'll get around to it). Then again, I do recall 'Super Mario's Sleigh Ride'. Not that this would ever compare to that masterpiece of a mix. I just felt like taking a break from more serious things. It's not a particularly fancy arrangement at this point. Source: Edit 7/30: After exploring the main melody a bit more I don't think I'd be able to pull off a full mix/blend of the two songs(I wasn't expecting to in the first place). I hope this has been entertaining nonetheless, but I think this will be shelved indefinitely.

Later half of the eighties on Japanese home computers is a goldmine, and Sierra did a really good job porting the game over on DOS. Same for Silpheed, pretty rocking soundtrack there. I recall reading somewhere that the Silpheed soundtrack was quite groundbreaking at the time (1986), pushing the envelope. Zeliard is also very much worth checking out as a game, if you're into sidescrolling action adventure games!

Yeah, the soundtrack is pretty awesome and I may do a few more things with it. Given the time it was released it has a lot of good stuff. In this case it just happened to follow a similar chord progression. I could probably turn this into something half decent. Might try a few things out when I've got more time.

Bananas, Directly To You: The Album.

Thank you, yes it looks to be. Proactive ; /prōˈaktiv/ Adj. see shadow24

I ain't got no problem with that. If you feel that a peer critique will help get a better remix sooner, than so be it. ACCEPTED. It would be a good learning experience and you can take the blame when I forget to show up for three days ina row. Mostly, it will just be taking over if I can't respond right away, and helping out with reviewing the quality of the remixes. I also like having someone that will be willing to disagree with any stupid decisions I make.

You need compression on the individual tracks in a recording or it will sound like an indistinct mess. Especially guitar and bass, drums also need light compression. Listen to 70's rock music and you can tell even then that the individual tracks have compression on them by how smooth the guitars sound. Where people mess it up is by then applying an unnecessary and obnoxious extra layer of compression to the mixdown afterward to make it louder. Of course this is only my opinion.

Something else that I almost forgot to mention is the reverb response of the headphones. I proceeded through the following headphones: Sony MDR-7502 (~$40) -> ??? (forgot)(~$60) -> Shure SRH240A (~$60) -> Grado SR-60i (~$80) -> Beyerdynamic DT-880 (250 ohm) (~$400, but 51% off, so ~$200) How I would describe them is the following: Sony MDR-7502 - Hugely lacking in bass and treble (honestly, above 1000 Hz was terrible); didn't pay attention to the reverb response here Shure SRH240A - Rather washy (with reverb), lacking in bass and upper treble Grado SR-60i - Less washy, clean bass, crisp treble (somewhat hard for bass mixing, though) Beyerdynamic DT-880 - Just dry enough for some excellent clarity, well-defined bass (loving it for bass mixing), distinct treble (so I can tell the difference between 14000 Hz and 18000 Hz, for example) So if you can, I think you should test the headphones you want to get on a song with a lot of reverb to see how much clarity you get. This aspect of headphones could change the amount of reverb you want to put in your music. If you can't test it... I wish you luck on that!