Audio mastering engineers have felt increasing pressure over the years to master recordings at ever increasing loudness levels as compared to other contemporary recordings, by way of dynamic compression, peak limiting, and hard clipping. This pursuit of loudness adds distortion, and reduces fidelity. When radio stations play the compromised audio through their FM processing chains, this confluence of degradation causes serious audio quality issues on air. This paper shall examine what the music endures when broadcast on FM, and how that led to the invention of the “undo” algorithm, which repairs damage caused by these mastering techniques by adaptively de-clipping and de-compressing the mastered recordings.
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