two digitallish questions.

[KA4HJH]

>>Clipping is very common on CDs.  I think it is intentional, to make chart
>>music sound loudest for radio play.  It shouldn't happen by accident, as
>>standards for professional digital audio specify around 10dB of headroom
>>between peak audio and digital clipping.
>
>Sadly, there really isn't any standard for levels on commercial CDs.  The
>Red Book may have made some recommendations, and people may have left some
>headroom, but there's no agreed upon practice.  In the last few years,
>there's been a bit of a volume war, to see who can make the "hottest" CDs.
>Now we're seeing some casualities, in the way of clipped CDs.

It's amazing how they've squashed every last bit out of recent CD's. The
flipside is that some "old" CD's were mastered at ridiculously inconsistent
and low levels as well. The all-timer in my collection must be using about
13 bits at the most.


>There was an article about monitoring and mastering loudness by Bob Katz
>printed in the AES journal last fall, addressing the troubles that a lack of
>standards has led to.  He recommended some practices for reasonable levels,
>and he also compared an older John Cougar Melloncamp tune to a recent Ricky
>Martin one.  The Melloncamp waveform looked like a fuzzy caterpillar, while
>Ricky was a pretty solid rectangle...

I've been seeing a lot of that lately. They compress it to death, then
normalize it to 100% Remember the guy who could recognize classical pieces
just by looking at the grooves on the record? Well, he's out of a job.


We won't even mention the fact that most CD's still don't have the
artist/titles stashed somewhere as text (boy, would that waste some space),
unless they just started doing it on all CD's at the first of the year or
something. Guess the crystal ball wasn't working perfectly the day they
came up with the Compact Disc...


-- 
Terry Bowman, KA4HJH
"The Mac Doctor"