[Bob Womack]

Originally Posted by Knives&Guitars

A completely different way of looking at Compression with three possible theories:

1. The Inverse Square law.
A prime example is with flash photography.
If you are taking a picture of someone indoors, and they are standing 10 feet from you, and a wall is another 10 feet behind the the person being photographed=

You might naturally assume that there is half the light reaching the wall as compared to the person being photographed. But this is not so. The inverse Square law states there only being 1/4 the amount of light, as there is on the Person being photographed.

I believe Sound goes through a similar path as the Inverse Square Law.
Is there not more dynamic range at a close distance than at a longer distance?
Compression, might actually be normalizing the close miked recorded sound, to emulate what we might naturally hear at 10, 20 feet away. From the Audiences perspective.

Sound does indeed follow the inverse square law but it is in power, not dynamic range. Ie, power varies by the inverse square with distance. There are also the issues of high-end absorption as sound travels through air and bass decoupling as we depart the source.

2. Close Distance Hearing

Are we able to hear the complete dynamic range in which we the artist are playing? Personally my ears are only about 10 inches away from the soundhole. I lean a bit into my guitar and sometimes even closer. We might not be able to hear the complete dynamic range at such close distances. There are several possibilities as to why this might be in regards to how our ears work.

"Here is how the ear works normally:
The sound waves are gathered by the outer ear and sent down the ear canal to the eardrum. The sound waves cause the eardrum to vibrate, which sets the three tiny bones in the middle ear into motion. The motion of the bones causes the fluid in the inner ear or cochlea to move. "
Now who is to say if there are not differences in each of us in just how much our eardrum vibrates and how the cochlea moves.
And what about hearing loss? I certainly have some especially in the higher frequencies. So the big question is; if my levels are down at certain frequencies...can I differentiate volumes accurately at close distances?

You've entered into the realm where Quantum Mechanics has failed us. Before Quantum Mechanics was popular and when I studied audio, the definition of sound didn't include the receiving individual. It was simply, "Compression and rarifaction of air molecules." With the addition of the receiving individual into the very definition, the epistemological status of sound is reduced to a relative quantity, no?

3. Perception.

And to go one step further, let us look at a beautiful photograph of a vase of flowers. The Photographer does everything possible to compliment the flowers with a nice background. In real life, Those Flowers are just sitting on a table top. Yet, those flowers in our normal household table, still evoke great emotion. Does not our minds, when we play...compress the sound to some degree? Do we not overlook-refabricate in our minds to suit how we wish to hear the piece? Think of that American Idol kid who is auditioning and thinks he has a great voice, but in reality...it is horrible. His mind is turning it into something it is not. I know I have sung out of key...but when I was singing..it sounded good to me. In the End, As the artist playing the instrument, compression just might be normalizing what we actually hear - (Think we hear) - ( or how are ears work at close distances)

Perception is an interesting critter. When we are standing in a room with a sound source, our minds tend to contextualize the experience. Sound of a passing car from a nearby road is understandable and so the mind isn't distracted by it. But record the primary sound source and thus separate it from the context and play it back: the mind no longer automatically filters out the context. That same car that drove by and you mind contextualized may drive you crazy when the context is removed. Add onto that a new context: listening on a car stereo or over earbuds in a subway. In those environments dynamic range may cause the music to virtually disappear in the new context's background noise.

All these considerations plus more (for instance reproduction systems) must be factored in to producing a consumable, enjoyable recording.

Bob