Compression in mic or in post?

[Michael]

Does anyone know which is better compression in mic or in post? I am leaning towards saying in post because I would expect being able to have total control in post would be better. Any ideas?

Thank you.

 

[Styxie]

Basically what you said , in post.

 

[Michael]

Basically what you said , in post.

Thanks Styxie, is it the same with hard limiters too? I would expect so if thats the case with compression

 

[Tarmack]

I've been back and forth on this for a long time personally. I run it in post primarily because a good compressor is expensive and I already own Audition.

If all you do is a single vocal track at a time, then doing it in Post is fine, which is why I do it that way. If I was going to live stream or get involved with Skype calls and podcasts more frequently, then I'd probably look more towards hardware compression on the line.

The primariy problem with doing it in Post, I believe, is that you're always recording at a lower intensity than you could otherwise be. You're always boosting the lows and chopping the highs, whereas if you ran a compressor inline, your overall input signal could be stronger. I feel like this should be a quality improvement, but whether it is audible to most or not would be debatable and I've not done enough testing to know for sure.

 

[Michael]

I've been back and forth on this for a long time personally. I run it in post primarily because a good compressor is expensive and I already own Audition.

If all you do is a single vocal track at a time, then doing it in Post is fine, which is why I do it that way. If I was going to live stream or get involved with Skype calls and podcasts more frequently, then I'd probably look more towards hardware compression on the line.

The primariy problem with doing it in Post, I believe, is that you're always recording at a lower intensity than you could otherwise be. You're always boosting the lows and chopping the highs, whereas if you ran a compressor inline, your overall input signal could be stronger. I feel like this should be a quality improvement, but whether it is audible to most or not would be debatable and I've not done enough testing to know for sure.

Thanks Tarmack, I will just keep doing it in post, do you recommend doing hard limits in post too?

 

[Tarmack]

I actually never use a limiter, so I'm not knowledgeable on the topic. Sorry.

 

[Michael]

I actually never use a limiter, so I'm not knowledgeable on the topic. Sorry.

Im starting to think I dont need to any more, on my old mic audio I used to apply one after a treble boost equalisation but on my new mic I dont use treble boost any more, it just sounds odd with it.

 

[Tarmack]

Im starting to think I dont need to any more, on my old mic audio I used to apply one after a treble boost equalisation but on my new mic I dont use treble boost any more, it just sounds odd with it.

My standard processing chain is dynamics, normalize, noise removal and mastering. I don't even use EQ these days.

 

[Michael]

My standard processing chain is dynamics, normalize, noise removal and mastering. I don't even use EQ these days.

I used to use a whole bunch, it was denoising first, normalize, compression, equalization boosts but they sound terrible when using the audio from my new mic, then hard limit because the peaks would be really high (I dont know the correct terms) and then normalize again.

Now I am not bothering to denoise unless I need to this new mics noise is almost non-existent in comparison, normalize, compression and then normalize again. I am not even sure I why I am normalizing twice, I picked that up from an audio editing tutorial and I dont know why I am doing it, is there a reason they would have done that and any reason why that would be useful?

 

[Tarmack]

I used to use a whole bunch, it was denoising first, normalize, compression, equalization boosts but they sound terrible when using the audio from my new mic, then hard limit because the peaks would be really high (I dont know the correct terms) and then normalize again.

Now I am not bothering to denoise unless I need to this new mics noise is almost non-existent in comparison, normalize, compression and then normalize again. I am not even sure I why I am normalizing twice, I picked that up from an audio editing tutorial and I dont know why I am doing it, is there a reason they would have done that and any reason why that would be useful?

heh, it might have been one of mine actually. I used to normalize, compress and normalize again. I used to do it because I felt that the compressor was more effective on a stronger signal. The real truth of the matter though was that my signal was too weak in the first place which means I was treating a symptom, not the problem.

Generally speaking, you want to do noise removal closer to the end, and definitely after any amplification. If you remove noise first, whatever noise is left then gets amplified by the normalize and it's not quite as clear.

Really, what you want is to be recording at as high an input volume as you can without clipping. The bulk of the track won't be as high though, just the peaks, so you compress it from there to even things out, and normalize to bring it back up to about a -1db baseline. Some people use -1, others use 0. I don't know that it really matters but I have found that when I use a 0db normalized track and overlay it on top of a gameplay video or with my licensed background music, sometimes the video volume will clip, even though the audio track by itself doesn't. That's why I switched to -1db.