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Re: Digital Distortion

Subject: Re: Digital Distortion
From: Clifford Caruthers <>
Date: Sun, 29 Jun 2003 12:26:35 -0700
I'll make this point again and see if anyone disagrees...  There is no
damage done to a file when you normalize.  If you have a very low level
recording -- as nature ambiences often are -- then you will bring out
low bit-rate artifacts and perhaps self-noise of the recorder that
should be left out of earshot.  This is if your peak level is -20db or
more.  The real lesson here is to attempt to use as much bit depth as
you can when recording without risk of clipping (this is limited by the
quality of your mic pre's but that's another can of worms).  My
experience has been that I can get away with 10 to 12 db of added gain
-- after that artifacts (which are already there) start to emerge.  A
good analogy would be to blow up a small picture until all you see are
pixellated dots -- there's just not enough captured information to
support the increased size (gain).

But while there is no damage from normalizing, personally I would
disable any function within a program that goes to work without asking
me -- it's just impolite... :)

Cliff



On Sunday, June 29, 2003, at 11:51 AM, Klas Strandberg wrote:

> I'd rather wonder if there should come up a warning :"You are now
> going to
> normalize the file. Are you sure you want to continue?"
> Or?? How much damage is there?=A0


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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