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. 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.

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.

--
Eric (Dero) Desrochers
http://homepage.mac.com/dero72

Hiroshima 45, Tchernobyl 86, Windows 95