It's stuff most of us know anways, but I thought you guys would still like to read it:

http://www.austin360.com/xl/content/music/...09/28cover.html

This is an article in a entertainment guide that is inserted into Austin's newspaper. I just thought it was good to see this being talked about in widely distributed print.

"MP3 players such as iPods have their own compressors and limiters, further reducing the dynamic range of recordings, as do computers. A CD doesn't have to be mastered loud; the iPod can make it as loud as everything else it plays."

*sigh* If only that were really true. Otherwise, it's an astoundingly good piece for a wide audience. (IIRC, Austin360 is an insert in the Statesman, right? I don't see it often in print form.)

Sigh. For years I've tried to get people to use the word "Coding" for things like WMA-Pro, AAC, Mpeg-2 Layer 3 Low Sampling Rate profile, AC3, MUSICAM, AC2, etc.

If we all called that "coding" we would not have this confusion about the word "compression" in the audio industry.

There are already, before digital coding, two "compressions", one of them intentional ala triode/light-bulb, and the other the result of physics, i.e. tape compression.

Adding a third is not the way to go.

... not quite, but hey it was a good try.

Very good piece, except for that one part about MP3 players having their own compressions and limiters.

The article was printed in an entertainment guide caled "XLent" which is produced by the Austin American Statesman which also runs austin360.com. Various Austin Statesmen stuff just ends up there online.

Ah, yeah, I forgot about XLent. I've never subscribed to the Statesman, actually.

I'm not sure about iPods, but the Rio Karma did have such a feature, which was enabled by default. It wasn't referred to as a compressor (it was "volume normalization" or "volume balance" or something) but it did a similar thing: boosted the volume when it went below a certain level.

I take it you're referring to the "auto gain control". It's a long time since I bought my Karma, but as far as I recall, it *wasn't* switched on by default. It is actually an incredibly useful feature - yet another thing that sets the Karma apart from the rest of the crowd. It has four settings: off (for normal listening), low, medium and high. I usually set it to low when travelling on trains, and medium when using it in my (rather noisy) car. Can't honestly think of a situation where high would be useful (perhaps in a helicopter? :-). For sure, it changes the natural dynamics of the music, but when listening in noisy environments it saves you having to constantly fiddle with the volume.

iPods and iTunes have Sound Check, which normalizes the audio, but it is not enabled by default.

Sound Check isn't analogous to the Karma's AGC. Sound Check does the same job as ReplayGain/MP3Gain/etc, in that it applies a linear volume adjustment to try and make all songs have the same average loudness. What the Karma's AGC does is dynamically adjust the instantaneous volume level according to how loud the track is at the moment. When you're listening in a noisy environment to a song that has a wide dynamic range, that's useful. (For example, before I got the Karma, it was pretty much pointless to try and listen to something like Roger Waters' "Amused to Death" in the car).

That is quite cool + handy.