All material © 2007. Martin Audio Ltd. Subject to change without notice.
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This example describes a very common situation which happens every day in venues all
over the world. This problem is actually not anybody’s fault; it’s just the way things evolve
through the years and the result of different opinions of how things should sound. But it is a
problem that we can control.
The way to overcome this problem is what we call the ‘radio station solution’. What happens
at the radio stations is that very strong multiband-limiting is applied to all the program
material, so that every song will sound the same and is as loud as the rest, no matter if it is
a middle of the road ballad or a techno track. This technique works quite well, but the
drawback is that the music loses all it’s dynamics, large amounts of harmonic distortion are
added and the carefully mixed material is losing it’s balance completely (hey, I didn’t know
that the tambourine in this song was louder than the lead vocal….). See the resulting
waveform from our example treated with the “radio solution” in the picture below.
