And how does one achieve this so that it works in all set ups? 

Or rather, should it work in all set ups?

I'm a conflixxed puppy here....

I guess it depends on who's talking :)

Well... A useful place to start thinking from is this: you actually can't "have" loudness at all. The listener controls loudness with their volume knob. So literally all you have is dynamics. 

That's not to say that overall levelling doesn't have its place; of course it does, and few of the tools at our disposal provide so much of the "making it sound like a real record" stuff as compression (both in this sense and in general application) does. 

The prosaic reality is that part of mixing is making the right judgment calls on your compromises between level and dynamics in a way that's appropriate to the material. I may be wrong, but your question reads like you're asking if there's an approach that always works. If that's what you're asking, then the answer is no. 

That's what I thought.

My head was confused with all this maximizing stuff....  


Thanks for the head straightening!

i believe having LOUDNESS and DYNAMICS together, at the same time, is strictly a function of song arrangement and songwriting skills, not what an engineer does.

I wouldn't say "strictly" but that's certainly the foundation and substance of it. There are various tricks for getting a bit of fake dynamism out of a flat performance, but they're nowhere near as effective as just having a good arrangement. 

For example, you might have a song that doesn't pick up much in the chorus. So the mix engineer could find an element to make louder or change the tone of or whatever. I quite often boost all the drums a tiny amount when a chorus hits. Or take something that's awash with reverb and suddenly make it a lot drier. There are things that can be done. Bet nobody's ever had to do them on AC/DC mixes though. 

trimph1


That's what I thought.

My head was confused with all this maximizing stuff....  


Thanks for the head straightening!

Maximising is a bad word in this context.  I've just answered why in the trolls thread that precipitated the confusion you are having.

Say if you recorded a live perfomance of Rachmaninov's piano concerto number 2, big crescendo's and fragile passages.  If you were to maximise that it would be ruined.

The dynamic differences between those passages would be skewed if they were all brought up to the same RMS levels it would sound ridiculous.

Well there is nothing to stop you from creating dynamic material to start with. I think a lot of lack of dynamics is in the original material. You can go from very soft passages to full on loud parts. It can sound great. Why not build more dynmaics into your music.

You can also get pretty loud levels during the masteing stage but for this you need a quality limiter. Limiters are not all created equal. The PSP Xenon is one serious limiter and at $250 I suppose it needs to be. It can add a lot of loudness to your mixes and still maintain reasonable transients and punch but it comes at a price. It won't change the dynamics of your material either but simply make your very dynamic track way louder.

There is a great feature in the PSP that keeps an eye on quieter sections and it can raise those levels slowly and smoothly automatically as well. It does not have to either you can turn it off too. This is one part of the limiter I am still learning about. Unlike a lot of limiters there are a lot of adjustments available in the PSP (10 to be exact) and you can really effect how it sounds during limiting which is powerful but also tricky at the same time. You really need to understand what each control actually does. They do explain it well in the manual though.

A useful place to start thinking from is this: you actually can't "have" loudness at all. The listener controls loudness with their volume knob. So literally all you have is dynamics. 

Very well said, John! 


Think of "loudness" as the converse of "dynamics". The louder it is, the less dynamic, and vice versa. 


So what about all the limiter vendors who make claims of preserving dynamics while increasing loudness? 


What they're selling is "intelligent" release algorithms, such as those used in Ozone and other better limiters. What they do is lengthen or shorten the release times automatically based on the incoming material, which tends to squash the micro-dynamics less and allows better definition of transients. This mitigates some of the worst side-effects of excessive limiting such as making music sound dull and lacking "punch".