I saw that classic FM was broadcasting a concert that looked interesting (Radio 3 had the usual unlistenable modern stuff). I was a bit early for the concert but they were playing a guitar concerto and I was happy to listen to that and wait for the start of the concert. I thought the sound balance was a bit off because the guitar was the same loudness as the whole orchestra but hey ho I like the sound of a good classical guitar and I know that professional musicians have ones that really can fill a concert hall with sound.
This is pretty typical with classical music recordings. In all likelihood, there is a microphone (or microphones) close to the guitar soloist and the sound from those are mixed such that the orchestra does not overpower it or that the guitar overpowers the orchestra. This is common practice on recordings of concertos and even on regular orchestral/chamber recordings where certain instruments will be overpowered by others. Sometimes this can be heard when harps are loudly audible in a busy orchestral piece.
Obviously, this is not a good representation of a concert unless one wants to maybe hear it from the perspective of the soloist, but it seems the record labels assume that listeners of recordings want to hear their music this way. Klassik doesn't have a big problem with this since Klassik can mentally adjust for what things would sound like live and it's nice to hear the instruments individually especially on something like a concerto.
But by 10 minutes into the actual concert I realised what was going on. The dimwits at Classic FM were applying boost to the quiet passages and knocking back the loud bits.
The whole thing was deeply unpleasant and I had to turn it off.
I didn’t think that radio stations did this any more.
Klassik does not listen to too many concerts on radio. We don't even have a classical radio station on analog radio here in Houston.
That said, radio programming tends to be highly compressed for the sake of listener convenience. People often listen to the radio in noisy environments (the car, at work, etc.) and/or in circumstances where constantly adjusting the volume is not easy or advisable. People may also listen using headphones and getting a surprise would be considered unwanted. It's pretty much radio industry standard for all stations to have pretty similar levels.
So, maybe things are different in the UK than here in the US, but radio has to be considered a compressed form. Some people may not like this, but Klassik assures you that more people would complain about it if it wasn't compressed than because it is compressed. Classical listeners are less accustomed to compressed than pop listeners so that would certainly be a point of adjustment for classical listeners.
In fact, here in the US, there are laws concerning TV volume for commercials especially (the
CALM Act). Klassik does not believe such things exist for radio, but again, there are industry standards for these things and the breaking of industry standards might well lead to laws being made about such things.
