Cascaded audio compressors in broadcast chains degrade sound quality cumulatively
Evidence
A basic purpose of compression is to make loudness evoked by processed sound events roughly constant, and often also to maximize the loudness of the piece of audio content delivered. This processing is advantageous when audio content should be audible over loud background noise existing in the listening conditions. This is typically the case in, say, car audio. A downside of this processing is that the non-linear processing changes the spectrum of the input signal, typically generating harmonic distortion in the output. A problem arises when several compressors are in the signal path: the resulting attributes of perceived audio can differ immensely from those in the mastering studio and may lead to large changes in perceptual attributes of the reproduced sound. This situation can exist in broadcasting, because most broadcasters compress all broadcast audio regardless of whether the content has already been compressed or not; this is possibly followed by further compression by audio devices like those in a car, which also compress their output. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 1952
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to the loudness war concept and to audio fidelity debates in broadcasting, a classic signal-chain compounding problem.
Related
- Audio compression maximizes information by encoding only unpredictable signal parts (similarity 0.80)
- Audio compression exploits masking to discard inaudible signal parts (similarity 0.79)
Broader Connections
- Audio coding aims to reconstruct signals while other processing modifies them
#expands(0.80) — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 2066