Music For Resturants. Compressors?

[Muffsterham]

My boss at the restaurant where I work recently set up a new stereo system which he can plug his Ipod into. He usually just puts everything on shuffle, and the problem we have is that from track to track the volume changes considerably. Some tracks are mastered up quite loud and others are sort of dead, and also the differences in equalization affect that too. Anyways it's sort of his pet peeve when a song comes on and you can't hear it at all but the next one is earsplitting. :rolleyes:

Anyways I was wondering if a studio compressor (like a one or two hundred dollar type thing) would be able to smooth out this problem without making the audio sound lousy in some way? Is that an absurd idea? Or is that exactly what compressors are designed to do.

So basically I just wanted some feedback from someone knowledgeable before sinking any money into it.




-Muffy

[lazaraga]

it's a stupid idea.

hire real musicians

[nice keetee]

it's a stupid idea.

hire real musicians

or use muzak or their new name

[SoundMan]

On my ipod, under settings, there is one called "Sound Check". Turn it on, it normalizes the volume across all songs.

All ipods may not have this, mine is 3rd gen Nano.

SoundMan

[MV4824]

Buy a used studio compressor, or a shit laptop to install a VST program on it and monitor a limiter VST from your ipod to laptop to speakers.

[mustys]

The Ipod already does that, Go in settings and there is a sound limiter that evens out every songs

[ferry82]

I think you should suggest your boss to ajust the volumn before he copy the songs to his ipod.:rolleyes:

[jhphoto]

a compressor/limiter wont really solve the problem by itself because it would just knock everything up a bit so you'd still have the same volume disparity only sounding worse and at a higher volume. normalization is the main key, plus a bit of compression/limiting as well (adjusting the threshold to compress the lesser-compressed tracks and preserving the more overly-compressed ones)