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Re: Levels

Posted by balUns (P) on July 19, 2001 at 21:36:37

In Reply to: Re: standard audio levels posted by Roland on July 10, 2001 at 08:53:29:

I feel that nothing is gained by setting the output threshold on a stereo digital limiter (such as Waves' L2) to anything higher than
-0.5 dBFS. My colleague at QCA Mastering pointed out to me that we humans can't really tell the difference between a transient that hits -0.5 dBFS and one that hits Full Scale (although we can tell the difference if a string of samples in a row is at FS) and the risk of distorting the less-than-audiophile analog stages of many a DAC
makes going higher than -0.5 dBFS (or, at least, -0.3 dBFS) risky for playback on those systems. We really only notice average gain.
I think -6 dBFS is, unfortunately, at the low end of today's very loud masters. David Bowie's "Earthling" seems to be about -4 dB, as well as Zero 7's "Simple Things." Of course this is with a 600ms RMS meter. They're just walls of sound, without crenelation.
And these aren't hard rock, either. But neither example contains even one sample at 0 dBFS. A testament to the extreme compression distortion the mixes have undergone. I've watched them closely on Metric Halo's Spectra Foo implementation of the K-System digital meters, designed by Bob Katz.
I like loud (i.e heavily compressed) recordings because they tend to sound better on little speakers. Not everyone likes "dynamics," either. I confess that many a natural sounding recording comes off too natural. Often we just want to hear a sort of film of the song, without having to relive the song. But I think we've taken this gain-lust too far. Also, unless you're using Cedar, or Sonic's No Noise, it's hard to boost the music without raising the noise floor into the very audible range. I've tried de-noising with Ionizer and found it was either ineffective or did make the noise go away, but at the expense of making the music sound like it's under water. But I digress...
I like the Katz approach for pop levels. Average gain is -14 dBFS. That's 4 dB louder than the European standard. Plus it leaves all this
headroom for crescendi!!!!!!!!!

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Kimber Kable

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