I've been studying Bob Katz' book 'Mastering Audio' and I've run across an explanation on compression I just can't get no matter how mant times I read it. (good book, BTW.... thanks a lot Bob)
Anyway on page 119 there's a diagram of a simple tone burst. It starts loud, then drops in level and then goes back to it's original level. All of these gain changes are instantaneous so the tone burst looks like the letter "H" Next is a diagram of the same tone burst treated with compression, fast atttack, fast release and the threshold is set midway between the loud and the soft sections.
OK, so now the louder part of the burst becomes squashed. No problem. But the softer part gets brought up in volume. I just don't get this. Shouldn't the softer part return to unity gain after the signal drops below the threshold?
(hope this isn't too hard to follow, if you have the book the diagram makes it pretty clear)
Thanks for the help