Dynamic Range Sound Compressor Unit

Abstract

As music tends to get produced for low end speakers and to sound the loudest, this paper might suggest a solution to end the so called loudness war. If the destructive dynamic range compression can be applied at the end users level instead of in the sound file itself, the producers can master with high-fidelity in mind again, so this text will describe the development of a dynamic range compressor designed for this specific purpose and then break down if and/or how the results holds promise. The prototype is based on a small Linux computer with physical input and output through an external soundcard. The utilities JackD 2 and ALSA is used for the sound handling, and the code is written in C. Math concepts used to develop the code will be described in the Theory part, but the code itself will not be gone through in this paper. However, the code should be accessible online and it is open source.