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does Automatic Rec Level compress the audio slightly?

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Guest Anonymous

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Guest Anonymous

I have been recording from an optical source to my MD-recorder. Question: if I use my MD player's 'automatic recording level', will I effectively be compressing the music slightly? (I mean dynamic audio compression not data compression.) This would surely alter the sound of the music by applying more compression to it...?

I just find it a pain to have to adjust the 'manual recording level' for each source that I want to record, and would rather use the automatic one all the time instead. I've tried both methods but can't seem to tell much difference......maybe there is no signifiant difference. I'd be interested to hear anyone's thoughts on this.

Thanks

J.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Yes, you should never really use AGC for music (that matters) - the natural dynamics (loudness/softness) of the music will be lost with the MD constantly compensating. Stick to a constant (manual) level, as the sound engineers should have already got the right balance on an album as a whole. Of course if your music is all loud or all soft you might not be able to detect the levels changing very much.

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  • 1 month later...

when i first got a minidisc recorder, i didn't know about this and all my recordings were shite.

The automatic recording level gives a huge and very noticable dynamic compression, and sounds awful most of the time, except when recording live acoustic music eg guitars, where it's fairly good.

However if you record from a digital source, the quality will not be affected this way, it is a direct copy off the cd (or whatever) ad will have the same dynamic profile.

Hope this helps

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