[Thomas W. Bethe]

Originally Posted by rufus13

Even among the folks protesting "too much loudness/clipping", I see the yardsticks come out. The only digital number that matters is the horrid distortion when too many samples get recorded as 0dBU FS because the input blasted past the limiter and past zero dB FS.

"Loudness" is in our ears and in our heads, and varies from hour-to-hour/day-to-day. Machine-levels (VU, Peak meters, peak sample value, overall RMS value of a track ) and their display are to assist us in not overloading amplifiers and recorders. People don't hear like that.

Listen, don't measure. Leave lots of headroom. Make good recordings. Best wishes.

In the old days we did not have all the pretty waveform displays, the peak meters, the waterfall displays of frequency versus time or any of the display tools of the modern DAW and we got along just fine with a VU meter and our ears. Today too many people mix or master to the visual representations instead of using their ears or a simple VU meter. Maybe if they turned all that stuff off and use the best measuring tools around (your ears) music would start to sound better. It is, after all, what our ears were designed to do and that is listen. When you confuse the aural/visual cortex you start to get all kind of weird and wacky things happening.

Maybe in the old days, the ones everyone seems to want to return to, it was that way because both musicians and engineers used their ears more than they do today. Before the advent of guitar tuners musicians had to learn to hear the tunings on their guitars and know how to correct it. Today many musicians couldn't tune a guitar without a tuner and that is very scary. Many recording and mastering engineers have way too much visual stimulation going on when they are recording and or mastering and that may be what is driving the loudness wars.

I had a hip hop client it and he was watching my DORROUGH Meters and noticed that all of the LED lights were not on all of the time. He turns to me and says "Hey I is paying you for making this sound good and LOUD and I wants all the lights on all the time" I tried to explain to him what was going on but in the end I did what he requested and kept all the lights on all the time. Maybe that is the audio mastering mantra for the beginning of this millennium "KEEP ALL THE LIGHTS ON ALL THE TIME"

FWIW