Fine, I'll continue if you want, and I'll ask again, will you explain how dbx didn't work then? If you can't explain how dbx's noise reduction technique did not work then there is no point in you saying one more word about it, because you are stating that it could not work, yet, it does.

so now you're using what I already stated as your own argument? heh. And while you're quoting yourself I suggest you go re-read what you wrote and what you were replying to.  The guy was asking if it were possible to increase dynamics.  Your reply was that it was not, and only after it was pointed out to you that you were wrong did you change your tune.

basically because first you were stating something that was wrong.  then you were stating something that relied on degree of accuracy to be wrong. and dbx doesn't give a reasonable reconstruction, for all intents and purposes it gives a perfect reconstruction, since it takes place in the analog world, where your accuracy argument is pretty much meaningless. "Perfectly" doesn't apply.  You're talking about dealing with digital audio, which doesn't represent audio perfectly in the first place, what with only sampling the audio at certain distances apart in time.  If you want to look at it from a integer math point of view, fine.  But then it just comes down to how accurately you're doing your math. In which case I'm right in one instance, and you're right in another.

Garf,
the slow compressor obviously uses some kind of absolute threshold, only kicking in if the peak is above some -20dB for a while. So if it is fed music with some very silent and some not-quite-so-silent passages, the former remain unchanged, while the latter are amplified.  In this case, the compressor effectively does the opposite of what it's supposed to do, increasing dynamic range rather than compressing it.
I tried using the compressor for classical music, but this effect can be quite annoying. Very silent passages are just as hardly audible as before (they are actually unchanged, I visually verified this with an audio editor), plus there are now sudden, unexpected jumps in volume if the music gets just a tiny little bit louder.
Is this intended behaviour?

Garf,
I'm using 0.8 special, and (for example) Peak limit does this
0%=silence
1%=~6dB down
anything higher = no apparent effect.

I want to basically have everything bought up to a 0dB level peak.

What seems to happen is with some bass boose in the eq which is ahead of the dynamics compressor in the DSP manager, is that when the bass kicks in, the compressor will turn down to prevent clipping as it should, but it never brings the level up again.

This is really obvuious in most of daft punk - discovery where the bass comes and goes all thru the first track. As soon as I touch any slider in the dynamics compressor screen, the level comes up again.

The behaviour is intended, the goal is not to boost up background noise to extreme levels.

Turn the input gain slider up, it should be enough to bring the quiet pieces into the amplification range

(if not, I'll have to extend the range)

Quote

Garf,
I'm using 0.8 special, and (for example) Peak limit does this
0%=silence
1%=~6dB down
anything higher = no apparent effect.

Peak limit determines the maximum output level ever used.

I cannot reproduce your problem - it works as expected here.

For what you're doing, the Advanced Limiter would be much better though.

But if I understand you correctly it seems that it doesn't properly adjust up again if the loud section is followed by a more quiet section? I certainly haven't noticed such a thing...