Sydney Recording Studios, like Crash Symphony Productions, use Double Compression (also known as “French House” compression). It’s one method of enhancing our voice recording. This is particularly true when it comes to recording audiobooks. Audiobooks, for Sydney Recording Studios, are a hard slog. What can really slow down the process of recording an audiobook is the amount of time that it takes to bounce out the audio, the chapters. interestingly, what slows the bounce rate down, is the use of multiple plugins on a track. This is because the computer needs to process all that audio information as the audio is bounced out. Noise gating the audio to disk and minimising the number of plugins used always speeds up the double Compression process, and thus, makes the audiobook more cost effective for the client and for Sydney Recording Studios like Crash Symphony Productions.
Double compression?
In order for Sydney Recording Studios to get the best use out of their noise gates they try and level out the dynamic of the vocal! By gating a very dynamically consistent audio signal the noise gate doesn’t need to work so hard to filter the speech. This means that we can be more certain that the gate isn’t going to cut off parts of the speech! This is why we use the noise gate! That’s the last component in the hardware chain.
To set up double compression we send the signal from the preamplifier straight into a compressor that is set to a limiting function. That Double Compression limited signal is then sent to a second stage of compression. This is set to normal compression of a ratio of about 4:1 or 6:1. On both stages the compression is subtle but enough to level out the vocal signal. By the time it hits the noise gate the signal is highly predictable. The noise gate will more certainly treat the Double Compression vocal the way we want it to. No cutting off of words!
