In article ,
Lord Hasenpfeffer wrote:

Actually, my argument seems to have been munged into being a continual
defense of my preferential use of the Linux application named "normalize".

It is the amplifier that makes the loudness to happen.

You score two points!

Limiting or even worse, clipping, the high peaks by increasing
the volume makes more harm than the slight amount of added noise
by doing the reverse.

Point taken.

I have never seen even a "quiet" remaster (in pop/rock arena)

Nor have I.

to not have it's peaks at very close to 0dBFS.

Correct. And while many "older CDs" remain unavailable in digitally
remastered form, it is very sweet to at least be able to elevate the
loudnesses of older, quieter and, therefore, lackluster sounding
pop/rock CDs into the general range of more modern, remastered CDs.
While this obviously does not improve the fidelity of the original
recording, it certainly makes them much more of a pleasure to hear with
my computer.

Well, I've looked through the source code for "normalize", and
from what I see, all it's doing (in normal mode of operation) is a
simple volume-boost. It's not increasing the dynamic range of the
music signal at all... it's just lifting it up to a higher point in
the 16-bit digital number space curve. It may, in fact, actually
reduce the useful dynamic range of the signal a bit, if there are
peaks in the original signal which end up having to be gain-limited in
order to avoid clipping.

This means, quite simply, that the effect of running a "whole album"
normalization such as you are doing is has a very specific and easily
describable effect:

It is _precisely_ the same as simply turning up the volume knob on
your computer or CD player by a few dB!

No other difference. No improvement in dynamics. No change in
frequency response or content. No improvement in the actual amount of
musical information present in the recording. None at all.

Well, that's not strictly true. The "normalize" program makes a
fairly common mistake. It's rescaling an audio signal by a
non-integer scale factor (which is OK), but it is *not* re-dithering
the signal when it does so. It's just rounding, and that's not OK.

By doing this, the normalization process is adding distortion -
it's adding a signal-correlated quantization noise.

It turns out that a very similar problem was likely the cause of many
of the complaints about "digital sound" during the early years of the
CD. Analog tapes were digitized using converters which didn't dither
the signal, and there's reason to believe that this probably
contributed somewhat to the "graininess" or harshness of many of the
early CD releases, and to the perceived loss of ambience and low-level
detail in some cases.

By using "normalize" on your CDs, you have re-created this error in
your resulting product.

If you really do want to gain-boost/normalize your CDs, I suggest two
things:

- Study up on digital recording theory and technology, so that you'll
understand that doing so adds precisely _no_ musical information,
and has no beneficial effect which couldn't be achieved by simply
turning up the CD player's volume control a bit.

- Use a better gain-alteration program - one which actually redithers
the signal after scaling it. This will ensure that the
normalization process doesn't add distortion.

I honestly believe that if a record label wanted to do it, it could
simply re-issue "normalized" versions of the CDs in its catalog, slap a
"Newly digitally remastered!" sticker on their wrappers and sell 'em to
a loud-hungry public - and, again, there would be dancing in the street.

Perception is everything.

Marketing and reality often have little to do with one another.

If you want to market your "normalized" versions as superior, that's
your business... but please don't expect people who understand the
truth of the technology to agree that they are in any way superior to
the un-normalized versions.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Hosting the Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
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