How old is (dynamic range) compression?

[rasputin1963]

WIKI is surprisingly mum about the history of Dynamic Range Compression in the recording field.

 

Have you any knowledge of the beginnings of compression?

 

Earlier than, say, 1960? Earlier than 1950?

 

Some of the 1940's Big Band vocal records (like the Dinah Shore, Vaughn Monroe, Johnny Mercer and Pied Pipers recordings) still sound surprisingly good and evenhanded and balanced today... Did they already have compression devices back then? Heck, for that matter, did they already have multi-microphone-bussed into one mixer recording in the 1940's?

 

Frankly, I imagine that recording a huge Big Band ensemble (with horns, with strings, with drums, with vox and vocal choir) was a bit of a nightmare in the 40's, no?

 

 

Thanks, ras

[Anderton]

Compression was born the day the volume control was invented: Engineers turned down the input level on peaks, and turned it up in quiet parts. Yes, you had to be good...

[Jeff da Weasel]

Yup. What you think of as compression was known as AGC... automatic gain control. Before that, mix engineers had to have nimble fingers and a great awareness of the song itself. It wasn't until the circuitry was developed in the earliest compressors (developed for radio, natch) in the 50s that any of this was automated.

[Billster]

 

Frankly, I imagine that recording a huge Big Band ensemble ( with horns, with strings, with drums, with vox and vocal choir) was a bit of a nightmare in the 40's, no?

 

 

But the bands in those days were dynamic performing ensembles that could mix themselves as they performed. Classic big bands like Ellington and Basie honed their craft on stage and performed their dynamics. The recording engineer just had to be smart enough to put the microphone in the right place.

[blue2blue]

Volume limiting circuits go back to the 30s, if I'm not mistaken, to not that long after the beginning of the vacuum tube era.

 

Speaking of riding faders -- I loved the recording studio sequence in O Brother, Where Art Thou? It was a little overstated, of course, but highlighted how mixing was handled in the acoustic recording era.

 

 

Audio technology progress in the 20's and 30's was quite rapid, driven by radio and the push to sound movies.

 

 

I got one for the techno kids.

 

How old is what we now call the vocoder? 70s? 60s?

 

How about some time in the 30s?

 

The Kay Kyser big band musical comedy horror movie "You'll Find Out" (released in 1940, with Lugosi, Karloff and Lorre, the only time all three were in one movie) makes use of vocoder type effects as the "voice" of the Lugosi character's "invention," the Sonovox, a big box (no doubt a prop unrelated to the actual device) that looked a little like a fancy jukebox of the era but out of which various vocoder-filtered elements of the band mix were fed -- a cool aspect of the Sonovox (in the movie) was its animated, singing "mouth" light display. (This visual prop bit was almost certainly controlled by human interaction rather than electronically. It doesn't seem to be directly yoked to, say, the volume of the vocal channel -- it matches the words too closely. But the sound of the thing will be instantly familiar to anyone whose used a vocoder type dynamic filter system.)

 

The Wikipedia article on talkboxes covers it (though, as of this writing, misses the Kayser movie, while mentioning the Sonovox's use in Disney's Dumbo, also released in 1940). They mention that one of the earliest uses was desmonstrated in a Pathe newsreel in the 1930s with Lucy Ball demonstrating its use. It was also widely used to create radio station promo ID's in that era. (I remember being dumbfounded back in the 70s when I bought an old aircheck record that had station promos embedded in the recorded program and they used the Sonovox, which I'd assumed was brand new that minute -- not 30 or more years old!

[Jeff da Weasel]

Volume limiting circuits go back to the 30s, if I'm not mistaken, to not that long after the beginning of the vacuum tube era.

 

But they didn't come into regular use in the recording studio until the early '60s.

 

Les Paul, who is an absolute barrel of laughs, was doing a lecture, and a young student asked him "Mr. Paul, I love the sound of the records you and Mary Ford did in the early '50s. What kind of compression were you using on those records?"

 

Les did a double take, and then said, "Compression? Compression??? I brought ten of those compressors with me today!"

 

And with that, he wiggled his fingers in front of the crowd. Cute.

[franknputer]

Hey blue!! Check this out!!

 

 

That thing is wacky!!:phil:

 

[EDIT: huh - YouTube embedding no workee?? Changed to link]

[blue2blue]

I'm not so sure about that chronology, Jeff. I'm pretty sure limiter/compressors were in use in studios. Certainly riding faders was a required skill, as well, for engineers. I did a lot of fader riding in the 80s.

 

But various forms of automatic level control were common. Many consumer decks had automatic leveling circuits built in. For instance, my dad had an Aiwa portable with "AVC" in the mid-60s. [it also had sound-triggered 'automatic' recording, making it perfect for bugging a room. In fact, when

my dad finally relented and let me start using the machine (since he wasn't really), he made me make a promise of personal ethics not to use its high technology to spy on people. An awesome responsiblity I mostly met.)

[blue2blue]

 

 

 

Yeah, that's the one -- this appears to be a Soundie promo film for the movie.

 

Isn't that cool?

 

It's a pretty funny little movie, with echoes of the Abbot Costello Meet the Wolfman type movies.

[Billster]

But they didn't come into regular use in the recording studio until the early '60s. Les Paul, who is an absolute barrel of laughs, was doing a lecture, and a young student asked him "Mr. Paul, I love the sound of the records you and Mary Ford did in the early '50s. What kind of compression were you using on those records?" Les did a double take, and then said, "Compression? Compression ??? I brought ten of those compressors with me today!" And with that, he wiggled his fingers in front of the crowd. Cute.

 

Les had Mary Ford singing too. They don't put that ability into a box of wires and knobs. That stuff relates to my earlier comment about performance dynamics. Les applied his ability to a multitrack recording, but he cut his teeth touring and playing live on radio during the 30's and 40's.

[franknputer]

Certainly, compressor/limiters are older than the 60s. How much they were used in studio recording is a good question - but then, much of the recording equipment that was being used (tubes, tape) performed its own compression inherently.

[blue2blue]

BTW... I notice that "companding" (signal compression before transmission and expansion after transmission -- the underlying principle behind the clumsy and error-prone dbx NR system) goes all the way back to 1925. (A. B. Clark of AT&T filed for patent in 1925 and it was awarded in '28.) The application of the technology was the then-trickier business of sending pictures electronically. (1925 is usually thought of as the year when television was first demonstrated successfully.)

 

In the transmission of pictures by electric currents, the method which consists in sending currents varied in a non-linear relation to the light values of the successive elements of the picture to be transmitted, and at the receiving end exposing corresponding elements of a sensitive surface to light varied in inverse non-linear relation to the received current.

[Jeff da Weasel]

Despite the Fairchild's birth in 1959, it didn't become common practice to use compression (as opposed to simple limiting) in recording applications until the '60s. Ask our pal Brucie... he was there.

 

Limiting was always required to some degree... high volume (especially in bass frequencies) would make a needle skip from the groove in creating acetate masters. But real compression -- containment of gain from both ends of the spectrum -- didn't get hip until 1960 and beyond.

[Jeff da Weasel]

Here's a great shot of Les' "compressor" in action (Mary Ford in the foreground, late 1940s)

 

[blue2blue]

Despite the Fairchild's birth in 1959, it didn't become common practice to use compression (as opposed to simple limiting) in recording applications until the '60s. Ask our pal Brucie... he was there. Limiting was always required to some degree... high volume (especially in bass frequencies) would make a needle skip from the groove in creating acetate masters. But real compression -- containment of gain from both ends of the spectrum -- didn't get hip until 1960 and beyond.

Well, if Bruce says that, I'm thinking he was the one with the boots on the ground.

 

 

[My first experience with a tape recorder was approximately 1955-56 and I was the talent... singing my big hit, "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into a very early Wollensak "piano-key" recorder. But it was only a few years later (1958) that I'd get the stereo bug when I heard Arthur Lyman's Taboo on an Ampex stereo recorder belonging to a friend of my folks. He was just moving to stereo. He had one speaker I'd later recognize as a Klipsch-horn and another unidentified speaker he was using temporarily until he could buy some smaller speakers for stereo. He was using a duplex tuner set up -- stereo was sometime broadcast in those days with one channel on AM and the other on FM, believe it or not -- more a gimmick than anything. Some special TV broadcasts used a similar stereo transmission path, suggesting viewers set a radio to the side of the TV for the "satellite" speaker. This was not too long before single groove stereo disks began being manufactured.]

[Jeff da Weasel]

Well, if Bruce says that, I'm thinking he was the one with the boots on the ground.

 

I have no idea if Bruce says that. I just know he'd be a good source of "from the horse's mouth" info in this particular regard.

[slight-return]

Gosh, I guess dynamic range compression itself is as early as our own nervous system

 

What say you guys abt the dynamic range limits inherent in media such a wire recorders,etc???

[Jeff da Weasel]

 

What say you guys abt the dynamic range limits inherent in media such a wire recorders,etc???

 

 

Very funny. Ha. Ha.

 

Here's a thought for you, though: for quite awhile, the cassette tape was a very common medium for purchasing music. And the dynamic range of a cassette tape on a GOOD day is (drum roll please)... 45dB.

 

In other words, a typical MP3 file kicks a cassette's ass in many regards, not that anyone ever thought cassettes were all that {censored} hot anyway.

 

So now we have all this dynamic range, and we use... like 3dB of it, jammed right into the ceiling. Yay!

[Bruce Swedien]

I have no idea if Bruce says that. I just know he'd be a good source of "from the horse's mouth" info in this particular regard.

 

 

Well - Here is what Brucie does say!!

 

I would call AGC - (Automatic Gain Control) Adaptive control

[slight-return]

Don't put one to many processors on the music just because the effects are in the control room.

 

 

Bruce, while I respect your opinion, I believe yo are missing an important part of the equation

 

those blinking light, those knobs

 

That {censored} be callin' me man, that {censored} be callin'

 

 

[3red]

wikipedia is not the only wiki. calling it wiki is like calling harmony central 'web site'