dimanche 7 Mai 2006, 18h04m

I wrote this in my LJ but then I figured may I should have just put it here. So I'll crosspost.

This is so painfully true. The -9dBFS figure is exactly what I get every time I remaster things for a mix. I could go to -12, but I'd be pushing everything down instead of half down and half up, and it would make the previously-too-hot tracks sound that much more obviously distorted, and the previously-decent ones still stick out as sounding "odd". Sigh. Ugly compromises. Next time I'm going to try to push the envelope (ha ha).

You always need a little wiggle room too, even after allowing for dynamic range, and I'd rather lean quieter there. (To be honest more than -12 is too far for me, for at least most kinds of music. Child of the 90s.) Nothing is more annoying than some engineer loading up the whole thing and punching a button and walking away. I love the part in the liner notes to Things Fall Apart (The Roots, I don't know why album-link isn't working) where Amir talks about this. I think I'll go listen to that later.

Mom and Steve noticed this on the wedding CD to the point where they thanked me for it, but having an immediate comparison to a ton of discs on shuffle will do that even if you're not an audio geek. It's so aggravating.

I need a copy of Photek 4. Not the one on the CD, the real thing. All of them, but that's really the one. I am itching to measure it. Or Test, or 2 on 1, or any of the other classics I've wanted to collect at some point. And then I'd buy the latest thing on Ram and spit very loudly.