Compression versus Art

Trevor Cox asks whether compression can detract from our enjoyment of recorded music - does it matter that what we hear may not be the same as what the musicians heard in the studio? How important is high quality reproduction? He looks at attempts to make music recordings sound louder and louder (the so-called Loudness War) and asks whether anything is lost in the process. And he considers whether making audio file sizes smaller, so that they take up less space on portable devices, means that some of the musical detail is lost. He talks to record producer Steve Levine (who produced Culture Club among many others) mastering engineer Ian Shepherd, the musician Steven Wilson, members of the BBC Philharmonic, and Dr Bruno Fazenda, Senior Lecturer in Audio Technology.