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Re: Digital Distortion

Subject: Re: Digital Distortion
From: Dan Dugan <>
Date: Tue, 24 Jun 2003 11:52:04 -0700
Klas, you wrote,

>I long for some real digitfreak to give me a list, like 1/ First do
>filtering, 2/ then dynamic work, 3/ then noise gates, 4/ finally
>normalizing. Just very practical and straightforward rules! And teaching m=
e
>the errors with doing in another way.
>
>I know people who normalize between each step, say, all 10 steps. It appea=
rs
>to me to be a dangerous way, but they claim it's okay.

I have an opinion on that: never normalize. Never. No need for it. At
the last stage of CD mastering, overall levels might be raised so the
loudest sounds are close to max or limited close to max, but that's
as far as you want to go. In intermediate steps, you need headroom
for processing.

Also, sounds that are naturally low-level, like ambiences, should not
be boosted up just so people have to turn them down to listen to
them. At the NSS workshop someone asked me about ambiences with peaks
reading at -20 or -30 dBFS, should they be normalized. No!

-Dan Dugan


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