SuperQ;281269 Wrote: > What? The noise floor in digital audio isn't theoretical, it's > mathematically provable. There is no noise floor, as a string of 0's > has no noise. What you have is 96dB of dynamic range. Right... All zeros is NO NOISE, at least as no-noise as your DAC can give you, maybe well over 100 dB. -96 dBFS noise assumes there are random bits going on below the 16th bit. In practice, some form of psuedo-random dither is generally used in the bottom bit of CDs to reduce quantization distortion, so the actual noise floor is usually around -90 dBFS. Maybe with noise-shaped dither and emphasis, you can approach 100 dBFS noise floor. However, in practice, they usually don't worry about the noise floor of the CD medium because the noise floor of the source material is often MUCH higher. Just zoom in (with an audio editor) on the beginning or end of an average track on a pop CD and you'll see where they faded the source noise in/out using a digital audio workstation.
So far as volume leveling, I use ReplayGain with the 89 dB SPL (-14 dBFS) target. I've never calibrated the speaker volume, so the -14 dBFS ReplayGain is shooting for when it say 89 dB SPL is probably not anywhere near 89 dB SPL, but ReplayGain generally does a pretty good job at it's default target of 89 dB SPL. Were I to make a change, I'd go lower, say 83 dB SPL, not higher. Since many movie soundtracks are mixed to 83 dB SPL (-20 dBFS) on calibrated monitors, the soundtracks on DVDs often reflect this lower average level. -- Timothy Stockman ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Timothy Stockman's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=8867 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=44938 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
