Hypercompression phenomenon...

[Xenu]

As of late, of course, there've been all sorts of discussion all over the board re. the scandal of hypercompressed discs, i.e. discs that--when you extract the audio and view it in an audio edited/viewer--look like a line drawn with a fairly thick sharpie.

The thing is, I've got a few discs that look like that and aren't "finalized," at least not in the traditional way. For example, a CD I got yesterday: Masahiro Naoe's "Hopkins Creek." Initially, on extraction, it seems as if most of the tracks were pushed WAY to the limit, with no dynamic room to speak of...

...but...

...wait a sec. Not *all* of the tracks on the disc are like that. Normally I'd blame the mastering engineer, but it's the same guy for all of the tracks.

The result of some futzing: it seems as if individual *elements* of some songs are compressed and tend to "dominate" the sound of the track. An experimental OOPSing analysis of one of these songs revealed that the backing track (drums, bass, acoustic guitar) was fairly generous on the dynamic range: it was the vocals and lead guitar that were causing the "white out" effect (and were also, coincidentally, in the center of the stereo spectrum).

Any input? It seems the mastering engineer isn't always quite to blame, especially when you have LOTS of "amateurs" recording their own material...