[Jeff Schmidt]

As someone who actually works in radio - here's the bottom line on this entire issue.

It does NOT need to be more complicated than this and I would caution you against listening to people who advise making it so.

Make your mix sound great on as many different systems as possible and it will translate well to radio.

That's it.

You will WASTE more time, money and effort trying to GUESS what your mix will sound like on specific radio stations and then trying to mix it or "master" it accordingly.

Every radio station applies totally DIFFERENT processing procedures and techniques to their signal. There's no "standard" for which you can apply a process to take advantage of.

However, ALL radio station processing fall into these categories - Band Pass EQ, Multiband Compression and Limiting, and Spectral Enhancement.

Making your mix "LOUD AS HELL" may sound great on a station that employs very little processing, but will quickly turn to thick as a brick muck on the "average to high" processing level employed by most stations.

Here's the point everyone misses on this issue.

The radio station wants their signal to be LOUD on the dial. So it pumps EVERYTHING EQUALLY.

That's radio's job. To make EVERYTHING it broadcasts sound loud.

My station will regularly play stuff like classic pink floyd with lots of dynamics and segue into modern rock with the whole brick wall waveform thing going on and the station's processing compensates.

BTW - strictly sonically speaking - the floyd almost always sounds better on the radio.

So, to re-iterate.

Your job is to make a great sounding mix that translates across as many playback systems as possible.

A great sounding mix will sound great on radio.

Period. [img]images/icons/cool.gif[/img]