CD Loudness or Amplitude

Since 1990, CD's have been produced at increasingly higher amplitudes each year.  They are meant to sound "louder" and hence (producers believe) "better".  Mastering Engineers have been under tremendous pressure to accomplish this, and always at the cost of fidelity.  Digital devices called "compressors" are now used to raise the amplitudes of all a track's instruments very unnaturally.  Vinyl LP's were not immune from this treatment either, although to a far lesser extent.  Thus began the current race for even more methods to increase perceived loudness.

Such manipulation always distorts the original sound.  Recording companies attempt to keep this distortion from being detectable by most listeners but certain people, particularly women, can hear it.

We have chosen not to do this to your LP or cassettes' recordings.  Rather, we tend to adhere to the standards of artistically-respectful engineers, like Bob Katz, who believes that the music of any genre should not be deformed by the misconceptions of mass-marketing.  We record the highest amplitude of each album side at 0dbFS.  This is the preferred, highest amplitude to achieve maximum range, without "clipping" the tops of the audio.

A note on "Normalizing" - You may be familiar with this process of raising audio levels to the standard 0dbFS level.  We never do this.  "Normalizing" is usually used to correct recordings made at incorrectly-low levels.  While it is useful for changing the level of existing recordings, it is another digital process that adds to the cumulative effect of least-significant-digit rounding error.  This cumulative error, although tiny, dictates that digital processing should be kept to a minimum.  In addition, recordings made at low levels lose their dynamic range in the digital domain.

Our method of setting recording level is a bit more time-consuming, and we consider it to be ideal:  We audition your LP or cassette, and set the 0dbFS level to the loudest point of each side.  This provides two important benefits:  (1)  The largest-possible dynamic range, (2) the relative mastering levels of your original media will be undisturbed; we respect the work of an album's mastering engineer, and do not seek to change this.  We never set our levels on a track-by-track basis.