Why? What? For the curious yet uninitiated, a compressor is an essential piece of studio gear. It allows one to control dynamics of a signal using certain parameters, which is really important for reasons documented elsewhere on the interwebs. The 1176 is a very popular form of FET compressor, which can work magic on all kinds of material, particularly vocals in my opinion. It’s big, warm, open, and can really help you bring out the room with the right attack/release settings.

I’ve already hit some hurdles with this project. Firstly, I don’t really know what I’m doing. Secondly, I don’t really know much about the 1176. It’s one of those great legendary pieces of kit that has a rich history, many many different versions, and the usual amount of ‘opinion’ floating around regarding which revision was the best, and for what (generally unscientific) reason. I’ve never had the privilege of using one myself, and even the modern commercial clones of the original are way out of my price range. I’m going to try and build one for around £200.

So, since I’m way out of my depth as per usual, the plan is to keep it simple. And thanks to the many others that have attempted this before me, help is abundant, albeit badly organised.

The current state of play is:

• There’s an awesome clone design from Jakob Erland, which many people have had success building.
• Mnats revised Jakob’s PCB design, to make them more flexible essentially, and has done great work since on building clones of the various 1176 revisions.
• I’ve ordered a set of Revision J boards from Mnats, which should be here next week.
• I intend on ordering most of the basic components from Mouser.
• I have a choice when it comes to transformers; do I opt for both input and output transformers? If so, do I order Lundahl transformers as suggested? Alternatively, Hairball Audio have stock of recreated B11148 output transformers, and I could stick with the op-amp based input.
• I’ll get a standard 2U rack case from somewhere..
• And have front panel custom made by Schaeffer.

So already I have choices which are confusing me, and I may encounter problems sourcing certain components.. we’ll see. Beyond this, there’s putting the thing together, and testing everything correctly along the way. I have the basic tools; soldering equipment, digital multi-meter, but probably need to buy a second hand scope.

I reckon I’m only scratching the surface to be honest.. this whole thing feels suspiciously like a can of worms!

Mastering is the process that recordings go through after leaving the mixing engineer and before arriving at the replication plant. A record might contain a whole bunch of mixes from different sources, at different levels, with different amounts of energy. It’s the mastering engineer’s job to make these mixes coherent.

There are many parts to this job, including; equalisation, microdynamics, macrodynamics, arrangement/spacing of tracks, and noise reduction/removal.

I’d like to talk about dynamics, and specifically, the loudness race.

Since the mid-nineties, CD mastering has become so aggressive that we’ve effectively backed ourselves into a corner. With each new hit wanting to push the loudness barrier a bit further, we’ve run out of headroom, with the majority of releases being first heavily compressed, and then brick wall limited, resulting in severe clipping. Which incidentally is a Bad Thing. 

Loud masters are fatiguing on the ears (which I think contributes to our impatience with music these days), and lack a major feature that I really look for in music – dynamics.

I can understand the reasons for the loudness race. Record companies want their track to sound fresher and bigger than the competition. But the trouble with all of this, is that perceived loudness is really just relative. Humans are pretty bad at judging absolute levels of sound pressure – or rather we’re pretty good at adjusting to what we’re hearing, zoning out noise, and focussing on what we want to hear.

So before I rattle on about this (more posts to come), I’d like to ask of anyone who might be reading…

1. Does the perceived average loudness of a recording make an impression on you about the quality of the recording?
    
2. Do you mind adjusting the level of your stereo/iPod from record to record?

I’m just curious really, to hear other opinions on the subject of loudness. Have a lovely xmas!