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rpc9943 · Location: USA Posts: 72

Hi everyone,

I'm sure youve heard this topic mulled over and over to pieces. I have a few questions, though. I have recorded bands and sounds for over 6 years and noticed that on CD's i listen to, the "loudness" and "presence" of music are so much more significant, when compared to music I have recorded and tried to compress, hard limit... pretty much anything I do, it gets it almost as loud, but the problem is, is that i record in cool edit, say, a song that I want to match from a professional cd, and the waveform is SIGNIFICANTLY LOWER, just by looking at it by eye. Are there methods im missing out on? I know theres mastering but still the waveform is so much smaller, yet so much more effective. Are there methods of making sure the EQ's are balanced so much to the point that you really can maybe use a statistical frequency graph or what? Or should I be using the multiband compressor setup? Please someone help me out :)

Thanks
Ron Cavagnaro

kylen · Posts: 290

Reference points. Subjective terms like loudness. Pretty hard to get that last 10% going to get a pro sound isn't it ?

You might consider this. Get the Yamaha 'Sound Reinforcement Handbook' and read the chapters on Sound Levels and Dynamic Range about 100 times - that's what I'm doing. I'm only up to 4 though!:)

What might be bugging you is something like this. Individual track record levels both average and peak as well as full mix rms and peak levels. You can get a pretty good pre-master of a full mix by making some peak adjustments as well as bringing the rms (loudness) up using 'sane' loudness maximizer techniques.

Assuming you've recorded the tracks correctly and nothing is either too low or crossed the 0dB digital peak ceiling of your soundcard
(for example maybe you've recorded with a track average of -6dB) and you have finished your mix satisfactorily you can try to make a pre-master and adjust the loudness to compete with commercial CDs a little better. If you seriously want to compete with professionals take it to a pro who masters for a living - this is just for fun and demos.:D

Normalize the peaks of your mix to -0.3dB (to allow for small overshoot) then rip a song from your favorite reference CD, a song that sounds musically similiar to the one you're working on. Get the stats on each song from the Cool Edit Pro single track view Statistics. Look at the average rms (loudness acording to how we hear) and the peak values. The difference between these 2 values is the [clinical] dynamic headroom of the song. You can also look at the average rms power and the max rms power, this is how much the loudness varies.

Now after having normalized your mix to -0.3dB or something and it still does't stand up against your reference song in terms of loudness then you can try to adjust the loudness level (average rms) up while at the same time limiting the peaks (since you don't want them going over -0.3dB (or whatever your ceiling is for a particular media like CD). At the same time you're sacrificing the dynamic range which is OK if you have too much headroom, but not OK if you don't - It'll just sound too squished.

You've already mentioned multi-band compressors and you can use those to adjust peaks and headroom in various frequency bands or octave ranges so you don't disturb the dynamics in areas that don't need adjustment.

There's a whole bunch of stuff to do before that to ensure a balanced mix (dynamics and EQ) and there's a whole lot of stuff to do after that to fine tune a good mix into a great pre-master.

I'm not sure if you have an unbalanced mix or if it's just low in perceived loundess because a couple of peaks are preventing you from getting a true normalize. It's kind of like when you do statistics, you have to knock some of the meaningless transient data out of the way...

You mentioned you've been doing this for 6 years. Are you coming in to digital from analog - like tape decks and things ? You get a lot of loudness and stuff for free out there. It's way different in here for me but at least the physics is the same - I just have to pay attention to it more!:)

Good mixing and pre-mastering !
kylen

VoodooRadio · Location: USA Posts: 3971

Koyaanisqatsi · Location: USA Posts: 31

Sadly, I'm having this exact same problem right now. Always have, actually.

These professional CD's sound so incredibly loud on a cd player, then you put them into CEP and find they're at exactly the same DB as your mixes are, and they even look the same in a frequency analysis, yet sound nothing alike. You start off with a good source, good equipment, but it never sounds anything like something done professionaly.

I'm starting to really lose hope that I'll ever get anything to sound good. Well, scratch that...my recordings sound pretty good actually, but you always have to crank up the volume to really hear them. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but it's the most frustrating thing I've ever dealt with.

:(

zemlin · Location: USA Posts: 1156

Koyaanisqatsi · Location: USA Posts: 31

kylen · Posts: 290

kylen · Posts: 290

Good point Pavell I saw your bump...

We might want to carry this conversation on over at:

http://www.audiomastersforum.net/phpbb/index.php

This forum will probably implode in a matter of days when they switch over to the official Adobe site...

come on over and register - you'll like it !

kylen

jonrose · Location: USA Posts: 2901