Holy mother of Kosh, that's bad.

I'm going to show this to some co-workers for laughs. I'm trying to imagine the possible settings that would lead to such a result, and my current guesses are:

A) there's a completely unnecessary normalizer in there after the compressor

B) the input level to the compressor is insanely high and the noise increase is due to the compressor's release

C) the compressor has a super-low threshold and automatic gain compensation is poorly configured.

Either way, they're doing it wrong, unless someone directly involved shows up and presents a logical reason for such a setup.