Compression versus Art

Available for over a year

Trevor Cox asks whether compression can detract from our enjoyment of recorded music. Does it matter that what we hear may not be the same as what the musicians first heard in the studio? How important is high quality reproduction? Trevor looks at attempts to make music recordings sound louder and louder (the so-called Loudness War) and asks whether anything is lost in the process. He also considers whether making audio file sizes smaller, so that they take up less space on portable devices, means that some of the musical detail is lost. Featuring the thoughts of: * Record producer Steve Levine (who produced Culture Club and many others) * Mastering engineer Ian Shepherd * Musician Steven Wilson * Members of the BBC Philharmonic * Dr Bruno Fazenda, Senior Lecturer in Audio Technology. Producer: Nick Holmes First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2016.