liffy99;271487 Wrote: > 4) Replay Gain - big losses ? > I've tried setting replay gain using EAC and Foobar and adjustments are > being shown as quite large. For example one album has had all its tracks > reduced by over 7db.
Oh, this is nothing, I have quite a few albums over 10 dB and the most I've seen is -12.5 dB. You can thank loudness wars for this. In my experience every album made after about 1988 will have negative RG, and it gets worse the newer the album is. > Does this 7db change relate to a difference between the musics original > recorded level and the notional 89db ? In other words was the music > ariginally recorded at a 96db level ? Yes. > How canI check original levels ? You can't, because the level will vary with the dynamics. There's very little of that left now, but the "baseline" still can't be calculated. The REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_PEAK tag denotes how close the album gets to 0 dBFS, but I'm not sure where 0 dBFS is on the scale - it's surely not 89 dB, because CDs can be recorded much louder than that. Also this is a peak value only, it doesn't determine how loud overall the album is, just that there was at least one sample this close to 0 dBFS. REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_PEAK values seem to be calculated such that 1 = 0 dBFS, so the decimal value in the tag indicates how close it gets to 0. A typical number is "1.00000000" for a fairly recent album and bad offender, Red Hot Chili Peppers -Californication-, "0.76196289" for an older album, -Led Zeppelin III-. Also this is the peak value, it doesn't indicate how loud the album is. Plus there can be a loud sound on the album but it can still be very dynamic, for example -Led Zeppelin IV- has a peak value of 0.99996948, yet it's hardly compressed or terribly loud - it's probably due to the huge dynamic swings rather than being recorded hot. > Are CDs mastered at more than 89db a problem ? Yes, due to compression and clipping. Again, search for loudness wars. There's definitely clipping on -Californication-, a simple listen will tell you that. Looking at the waveform will too, and the REPLAYGAIN_ALBUM_PEAK tag of exactly 1 is another dead giveaway. -- Mark Lanctot Ben Klass: "I won't even eat a pre-7.0 meal. Well, unless it involves bacon." SB2, Transporter, beta SBR, beta SBC, pre-production SBC ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Lanctot's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2071 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=43717 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
