The word means one thing at a mix desk and something completely unrelated at a delivery meeting. The second kind decides what a listener actually receives, and its formats fall into three families that are worth being able to tell apart.
Say the word compression in a control room and everyone reaches for the same idea: a device that reduces dynamic range, brings the quiet parts up relative to the loud ones, and leaves a fingerprint that people can hear and argue about. Say it in a delivery meeting and it means something with no relationship to that at all — making the file smaller. Same word, unrelated operations, and both can be applied to the same piece of audio in the same afternoon without either one knowing the other happened.
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