Replaygain can reduce the quailty of the audio since it reduces the level in the digital domain, which means loss of resolution. I've frequently seen adjustments of -10 to 12 db and many in the 2-10 range. The question is whether you feel you can hear the lost resolution in your system, etc. I don't use it any longer since I really don't have a problem with adjusting the audio level anyway. I find that I am adjusting the levels to suit my mood or the particular genre, etc. I'm only listening to flac with a decent system in a listening room and optimizing quaility is more important to me than the potential convenience of replay gain. Here's an excerpt from the site on the Replaygain standard that may help you decide...
"The (compromised?) solution we can offer now, to everyone, is to do what you suggest above - just turn the loud tracks down in the digital domain. With the standard I've proposed, it drops the level of a hard limited pop track by about 10 dB. There are two reasons why I don't think this is a serious problem: 1. Such a track already has a highly compressed dynamic range. Most of the energy was within -3dB of the peak. Now it's within -13dB of the (system) peak. Still way way way above the noise floor of even the worst soundcards. 2. Dropping 10dB is equivalent to losing 1.5-bits of resolution. The input data is likely to be 16-bit (with a CD source). You, and many others who care about sound quality, own 24-bit sound cards. The dynamic range is about 110dB. The noise floor of the original recording, even after being dropped by 10dB, is still the limiting factor - you're not going to loose anything in a 24-bit replay system. I realise the absolute highest fidelity possible when feeding a 16-bit source to a 24-bit sound card is to send it as-is, to occupy the top 16-bits. So whatever else you do is a compromise." Jim -- jfo ------------------------------------------------------------------------ jfo's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1135 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=32244 _______________________________________________ ripping mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/ripping
