[w4]

>I was about to question everything until I read this. Thanks AE. My understanding of MBC is more like a crossover (or mix of low, bandpass, and highpass filters) network followed by compression per band within each section of the frequency range.

This is exactly right. Basically, you separate the audio into arbitrary frequency bands, and then apply compression to each band to control its volume independent of what is going on in the rest of the spectrum.

I was incredibly frustrated by reading the article, since their explanation of multiband compression was incredibly misleading. I get what they're doing and why multiband is helpful (it sounds like they're basically bringing up the volume in the parts of the spectrum where the user's hearing is less sensitive than healthy hearing would be), but that was a poor explanation of how multiband compression works.