"Lord Hasenpfeffer" wrote in message

Low amplitudes are certainly something to be avoided when recording to
MiniDiscs because they'll undoubtedly cause the ATRAC compression
filters to remove the weakest, most susceptible frequencies that are
present in the soundsource.

And moreso with MP3, which you delight in listening to extensively.

MP3 is 'brute force' merely by virtue of it's encoding rate being
user-selectable, almost universally to highly detrimental values -
exactly those that excite you so much by their 'small file-size'.

For general listening purposes, 192KBps and even 128KBps MP3s are well
beyond adequate.

128 is defintie insufficient. 192 is seldom-used, 160 more common, and much
better than 128 though still audibly inferior to uncompressed (datawise).

And by way of your deliberate misinterpretation of my use of the term,
"brute force", it is clear that you have depleted your potential for
injecting meaningful contributions into this thread.

As you like...

However, I guess you'll manage to turn it around and totally contradict
yourself yet again, ending up claiming it is actually a Good Thing,
especially if put through a particular command line application in your
OS
of choice.

Well, my normalized MP3s do unquestionably sound better than those which
are not. I listen to them all the time. When they play in random
shuffle mode, it's patently obvious which ones have and which ones have
not been normalized.

'Better' to you being 'louder'. Although barely perceptably.

It seems to me that if the older method of measuring peaks vs. the newer
method of measuring peaks is real,

What new and old methods of measuring peaks ? There has always been one
consistent method.

Well, I just conducted a test. I put on my Capitol 1994 Remastered CD
of Pink Floyd, "Dark Side Of The Moon" and turned the volume knob all
the way down - and son of a gun, I couldn't hear *any* of the
frequencies that are recorded on that disc!

I have little confidence in your abiity to hear any subtleties at all, let
alone identify or describe them. Describing your playback chain might help.

geoff