[Blurb2350]

How exactly does audio compression alter Savage’s natural voice? Is it lower, higher, does he appear to speak faster . . . ?

[Alberta's Child]

The technology is used to detect short pauses in the speaker’s dialogue (at the end of a sentence, for example) and “splice” the narrative by cutting those pauses shorter. I haven’t listened to him in years so the technology may be much better now, but when I heard Savage on the air back then I could detect this by hearing an occasional faint clicking sound on the radio when he was speaking.

Radio stations do this to squeeze extra advertising time into the show without tangibly changing the content.

Respectable professional radio personalities hate it. Rush Limbaugh was accused of doing this years ago, and he adamantly insisted he would never do such a thing. It turned out that some of the radio affiliates that were broadcasting his show were using it on their own. From that point forward, every contract he signed with the network affiliates included a provision that explicitly prohibited this sort of thing.