EQ and compression are the two processors that do more to a recorded signal than anything else, and the math underneath both is simpler than the plugin GUIs suggest. We walk biquad filters, the parametric EQ math, attack and release in a compressor, the look-ahead trick, why the same algorithm in a $50 plugin and a $5000 hardware unit can sound surprisingly different, and where the money actually goes.
Compression
-
DSP for Audio -
Shannon and Information Theory: The 1948 Paper That Named the Bit Claude Shannon's 1948 paper defined the mathematical foundation of every digital communication system on earth. This post unpacks entropy as surprise, the source and channel coding theorems, the Shannon-Hartley limit, and the unexpected appearances of Shannon entropy in machine learning and the Kelly criterion.