Dynamic Range Compression articles

At wikipedia, you can find a well written, very informative article about Dynamic range compression. There are of course some basics at the beginning (ie. what compressor is) but you'll find some more practical stuff like: hard and soft knees, Peak vs RMS sensing, Look-ahead.

Article contains well designed images, really helping in understanding Dynamic Range Compression - especially I like limiting (with different amount of attack and release) and clipping compared. Also you'll learn about sidechain, parallel, multiband and serial compression.



But that's not all. There's another nice article at wikipedia called "Loudness wars".
With the advent of the CD and digital music, record companies, mixing engineers and mastering engineers have been gradually increasing the overall volume of commercial albums. Originally they would just push the volume up so that the single loudest point was at full volume, but more recently by using higher degrees of compression and limiting during mixing and mastering, compression algorithms have been engineered specifically to accomplish the task of maximizing audio level in the digital stream. Hard limiting or hard clipping can result, affecting the tone and timbre of the music in a way that one critic describes as "dogshit". The effort to increase loudness has been referred to as the "loudness wars".

Article 1: Dynamic Range Compression

Article 2: Loudness wars