Mercutio said:
Radio stations do a lot of funny things to sound...
I've seen 19-inch 72-U equipment racks at top-$ radio stations (KRBE FM was one I've seen, though there are others) that were labeled by the time of day, with each containing different brands of processing gear along with different EQ settings. By the way, many of these pieces of gear in those racks were as expensive as some automobiles, and some you could not buy, but only rent (for some very dear rates). The engineer in the back office would simply patch in the correct rack when it came time. And, to top it off, some of these racks were duplicated and sitting in standby mode just in case there were technical problems! Think of this crap as the equivalent to modern food, think Processed Cheese Spread.
And, just to lead the anti audio processing charge, there was one radio station here (KLOL FM) that was advertising "We Don't Process Our Signals!" Sure enough, they sounded a LOT less stressful on the eardrums, which was rather ironic since they play mostly hard rock. I suspect they got sick and tired of pissing away $300K ~ $400K each year.
Another COMMON piece of niche audio signal processing gear found in a lot of places -- including radio and television stations -- are what's "de- essers." These get rid of the "ssss" sound in speech. The "ssss" sound just absolutely drives most microphones into a tizzy for a few milliseconds and you hear this annoying distorted sound called "sibilance."
Then there are all of these other sound processors, which are very proprietary, that add some indescribable ambience, warmth, or presence to the signal, and might even do their own form of sibilance control. I own a couple of these types of units. One is an Aphex Aural Exciter and the other a BBE Sonic Maximizer.
Mercutio said:
While I'm thinking of it, A *HUGE* proportion of pop music is mixed for mono, rather than stereo play, even in 2004. Why? Because a lot of people hear music over PA systems, in elevators, or under less-than-ideal conditions (e.g. radio). There's very little channel seperation in pop music.
Wellllll.......... close. They normally only do a mono check to make sure that their stereo mix is compatible with mono. Some spatial effects can have enough phase shift between channels as to cause partial or significant cancellation problems when the Left and Right audio signals are summed. So, pretty much STANDARD PROCEDURE of any audio engineer during mixing is to do a Mono Check. And, just about as common -- and ALWAYS done with top hit prospects -- is to check your final mix using a selection of different speakers, of which some are nothing more than freeking 6x9 coaxial automobile speakers in a nice speaker cabinet!
But, the most popular way to handle this time consuming chore of listening to mixes through different speaker systems is to use a particular small 2-way Yamaha speaker (model NS-10, I believe) that was specifically developed for mixing purposes. This speaker was developed in the late 1970s to approximate the average sound of nearly all speakers and have not changed much at all -- if any -- in the past 20+ years. They are still highly popular to this day in most recording studios worldwide. Usually, you'll commonly see a little pair of these speakers sitting up close on top of the mixing console. But, during recording sessions, nobody listens to the music through these speakers. The engineers, producer, and musicians will instead listen to bigger, better, louder speakers at that point in time and/or through headphones.
Basicly, I want to listen to music and this encoding business is slowing me down. 
