"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
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"Robert Morein" wrote in message

"Arny Krueger" wrote in message
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"Scott Gardner" wrote in message


I'm recording some albums to my computer, and I'm having
trouble getting adequate volume in the completed files. I'm sure
it's just the combination of my cartridge and preamp. It's not
unusably low - with the input slider set all the way up on my sound
card, I can get it to -0.5 or -1.0 dB during the loud passages,

That's a great plenty, even way too much. It's good to have a little
headroom during the part of the process where you capture the sound
on the original media. By this I mean you should have from 6 to 10
dB of headroom between the highest peaks and digital full scale.

This is simply wrong. I don't understand why Arny would propagate such
nonsense.

It's the voice of practical experience, Morein. Furthermore, this easily
passes for conventional wisdom in an audio production group.

Reasonable amounts of headroom have zero audible cost because the dynamic
range of good modern digital recording equipment exceeds that of the
analog
domain, including recording consoles, microphones, mic preamps and rooms.

The argument does not hold water, because the noise floor of analog media is
not generally white noise. It would be necessary to show that the noise
spectrum masks the gratuitous deletion of the bit that you advertise as an
optimal procedure. You don't have the mathematical expertise to do that.