"Eric Desrochers" wrote in message

Mike Rivers wrote:

The reason to normalize is because the average listener is too lazy
to reach over (or get up) and turn up the volume. And on a lot of
those portable players that people use today, it's damn inconvenient
to adjust the volume because you don't have a knob, you have up/down
buttons.

I'm sure someone could come up with a situation where full scale on
the CD is desirable.

Coming up with a reason to have peaks that come within a few dB of full
scale is pretty easy, but coming up with a reason to have peaks that go to
exactly FS is pretty hard. After all, if you miss FS by 1 dB people can
hardly hear the difference between that and FS. OTOH, its not unusual to
find converters that act strange at some point within that last 1 dB before
FS.

Say a user with some cheap discman with low
sensitivity earbuds in a noisy environment. in that case, a CD that
is peaking at -18 dB may not produce sufficent output even with the
volume knob maxed out.

The 21st century real-world version of that story is typified by an European
iPod with Etymotic ER-4 or ER-6 earphones plugged into it. The problem was
so bad that Etymotic came out with a special high-output model of the ER-6.

I'm by no mean aproving the "CD volume war" that is going on for the
last 10 years, but simple normalizing is providing several benefits
for only a minute degradation in sound quality, imho.

Normalizing to -1 dB can work and provide few sonic disadvantages, if any.
Of course, not all music is optimized artistically by being played at the
highest reasonable levels.