On the radio, on television, on smartphones, by videoconference, in concert... Now, the sound transmitted is systematically compressed. Technically, this means that it has undergone a process to bring up the weaker levels of the band, reducing the gap with the loud levels. The sound variations are "packed" (which explains, for example, that in a film you hear both the actor whispering and the explosion that follows), and the whole tape passes above the ambient noise to that the sound remains audible in the street, in the car, in the middle of a crowd...
"It's the diversion of a technique developed in the 1960s by sound engineers to bring out a weak instrument in a formation musical - a guitar against a drum set, for example»
, explains Christian Hugonnet, acoustic engineer and founding president of the association La Semaine du son.
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