What Is Audio Compression?

Compression is often something that people throw in their mixes because it “sounds good” but they don’t really know what it is doing to their signal and sometime end up over compressing and squashing their signal. The concept of compression is pretty simple; make soft sounds louder and loud sounds softer, but how is that done? There is an overwhelming amount of hardware and plugin compressors out there but they all have the same basic parameters; Attack, Release, Threshold, Ratio, Knee, and Make-up Gain. Understand these basic parameters will make it easy to understand and use any compressor.READ MORE