Lord Hasenpfeffer wrote:

Understanding how to use the software to achieve desired results and
understanding the jargon used to describe the process are not
necessarily interdependent requirements of the experience overall.

Unless you wish to communicate about it with others.

Onion other hand, there's a good chance that I already do understand
what "RMS" is without actually recognizing the acronym. What exactly do
the letters represent?

Root Mean Square. If you square every sample in the file,
add all those numbers up, divide by the number of samples
and take the square root you get the RMS of the file. It is
a measure of its overall loudness. -12 dB is pretty hot.


I honestly think the reason why the older CDs sound as bad as they do is
because audio processing software such as "normalize" hadn't been
invented yet at the time they were manufactured.


If you think that louder is better. The process of
squeezing the dynamics of the music to get that extra
loudness introduces distortion (which may actually "enhance"
some kinds of music to some listeners) and generally makes
it less interesting. There is a growing sentiment among
recording professionals that it is exactly this process of
squeezing the dynamics for the sake of loudness that is
making music less and less interesting and faithful to what
was recorded and there is a growing movement away from it.


Bob
--

"Things should be described as simply as possible, but no
simpler."

A. Einstein