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Old 10-10-2019, 10:18 AM   #86
drumphil
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Retro Audio Enthusiast View Post
I agree, but that's when compressors are used as a special effect for the distinctive sound and colouring, not purely as level control. Artificial level control has a sound all of its own.
Practically, emulating the precise behavior of a compressor that only does level control with no "coloring" is basically impossible. Sure you can get much the same effect, but you'd have to do manual calculation per sample and apply that manually in automation to get the EXACT same result. I don't mean a very equivalent sounding result. I mean, to get the exact waveform a compressor gives you, through automation, requires performing the same calculations the compressor does, and then precisely replicating that with volume automation.

I'm not making a judgement about which way sound better. That's subjective. But to get the exact same output as the compressor, even a completely transparent one that just varies the volume, you have to do the same calculation it did.
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