eCo wrote: > Pat, Normalizing in my software simply adds a nominal gain throughout > the recording. The peaks and floor are all raised equivalently. As > long as you normalize the entire album as a unit, I see no problem with > it. Normalizing songs individually is a no-no, however.
Well, it is getting into theology. Are you trying to say 'entire album' similar to the way that replay gain tries to equalize all the tracks in an 'album'? You can normalize either individual tracks, or any group of tracks, as you wish, the approach is the same. What normalizing is supposed to do is ensure that the digital signals are full scale. Or at least that the highest (or lowest) signal is full scale. Now CDs are 16 bit PCM, so the range of amplitude is from 2^15 to -2^15 (roughly). This is 32K The values of zero are no signal, -32K is minimum, and +32K is max Suppose you had a tune where the values didn't go as high as +32K or down to -32K. Say they went from 16K to -16K. Then you are wasting some of the RedBook signal to noise ratio. And you can 'normalize' it by multiplying every value by 2. This does nothing to the zero points, raises the +16K to +32K and lowers the -16K to -32K. It is pure arithmetic. But it also raises any noise at the same time. And it does nothing to the signal to noise ratio. When you normalize by something not a power of two, it gets worse, as you can add in distortion from the rounding (or truncation). Its a personal choice, of course, but normalizing hurts the sound, and audiophiles and good recording engineers don't do it. -- Pat Farrell PRC recording studio http://www.pfarrell.com/PRC _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
