KVR Audio

Crackbaby · Post by **Crackbaby** » Mon Jul 01, 2013 11:04 am

I wonder if avoiding the loudness war is a good thing for techno. The genre sort of depend on loudness

sqigls · Post by **sqigls** » Mon Jul 01, 2013 12:14 pm

true. theres no use forcibly increasing the dynamic range of material that suits being squashed. you end up changing the whole feel of it. but maybe more to the point, certain music not only benefits from dynamics processors but kind of depends on them. I know many techno producers that have let me mess around with their signal chain (just for curiosity sake), and when I began 'softening' things a little, the whole vibe just starts deflating. That said, it would be the same if they started jamming my tracks through their slamming ratios...

Crackbaby · Post by **Crackbaby** » Mon Jul 01, 2013 3:46 pm

If you want to release on vinyl, what K should you use? I understand you need a bit more dynamic for the cut on the vinyl (or so i read). Is K-14 enough?
Genre is still techno if that matters..

kelldammit · Post by **kelldammit** » Mon Jul 01, 2013 5:30 pm

sqigls wrote:true. theres no use forcibly increasing the dynamic range of material that suits being squashed. you end up changing the whole feel of it. but maybe more to the point, certain music not only benefits from dynamics processors but kind of depends on them. I know many techno producers that have let me mess around with their signal chain (just for curiosity sake), and when I began 'softening' things a little, the whole vibe just starts deflating. That said, it would be the same if they started jamming my tracks through their slamming ratios...

Yup. In some cases, it makes perfect sense to squash things. For a slamming dancefloor track, it's perfectly legit. If programmed in such a way as to be consistent with the desired outcome, you don't really need a lot of dynamic treatment anyway...the compressors would be more of an effect, with some main bus compression to keep the overall track level consistent. Treating a track like that the way you would treat an orchestral track is just as wrong as the reverse, imo.

I think it comes down to appropriate mixing/mastering for the music at hand. I tend to see the loudness war gripe as just being way too much dynamic reduction at the cost of distortion and other garbage, irrespective of the material. K-system can't really help that in and of itself. I could deliver a "k20" mix with only 3 db of "real" dynamic range, for instance, and there's nothing to stop a mastering engineer from crushing a true k20 mix to oblivion, either...

I'm just glad that the "loudness war" hasn't spawned a hysterical knee-jerk reaction against compression in general.

AudioGuy720 · Post by **AudioGuy720** » Tue Jul 02, 2013 8:03 pm

I use the K-Meter plug-in all the time. I use it as a reference check during mastering as well. It's a great little free plug-in!

Crackbaby · Post by **Crackbaby** » Wed Jul 03, 2013 10:43 am

The K-Meter plugin by mzuther adds a latency of 1024 samples ..... anyone know of one that doesn't? Is there one in reaper included?

Anyone use K-Meter?