GAIN vs Amplify vs Compressors (Vinyl vs DVD)

[Mycenius]

Why on earth are you going to all the effort to rip vinyl and use MP3. That's a lossy format. That means you are purposely throwing away some of the sound from the vinyl. Rip them to FLAC so you will never have to do it again.

+1

Yep +1 Here.

@cathcam - the thing to keep in mind is you don't know what you don't know - who knows where you will be in 1, 2, 5, 10 years... If you end end up with a higher end system sometime, or even if you get to the point your listening to current system adjusts enough you can tell the difference you will regret not having done lossless originals for your ripping (the ripping an MP3 copy from that).

Its good if you are saving WAV originals but you should tag these up into FLAC (with 0 lossless compression if desired) then rip your MP3's from that.

By the way, if you are comparing the overall loudness of your vinyl to CDs don't forget that it is quite possible that dynamic range compression was applied then the CDs were mastered. Not a good thing. (There is lots written about the loudness wars.)

Indeed - well said. I never use replay gain or anything for anything - even on secondary or lower end systems. I always seek to play bit perfect and use the integral volume adjustment (analogue or digital) in the particular output device I'm using...

[BJW]

RG is bit perfect. That's what's great about it.

There is virtually no difference between using RG to adjust the volume, or a volume knob on an amp. Same thing, except RG is far more convenient, esp in a random mix.

[cathcam]

If I was using Audacity I would do the following

Set Audacity to record at 44.1 kHz 32bits

With 32 bits it isn't that critical to set an ideal recording level as you have lots of headroom to play with. Just make sure that the peaks are well clear of any clipping.

Then use Audacity to Normalize the whole album, say at -1 dB peak (-1 dB to give you headroom when you convert to mp3). This will apply a volume increase so that the peaks reach -1 dB or whatever level you choose.

Thanks for all this, it's pretty much what I've been doing since reading it, including re-digitizing many of the albums from the .flac saved files. Seems to be working out pretty well. The PS Audio Phono Nu Wave is able to send the vinyl signal via USB at 4800khz, 32bits, and so I've been using that. More is better?

Having said that, there is a problem with LPs in that you are likely to have multiple clicks, etc. Those clicks can spike to a higher level than the music. So ideally you should clean up the clicks etc before doing any Normalization.

Check. I have an audacity macro that does the lifting that I've been modifying. I clean-up the clicks, peaks and manually repair before using the macro.

Then reduce the bit depth for the whole album to 16 bits (with dither), save in whatever format you choose. Personally I would always save as FLAC (for a reference backup) even if I was then going to save as mp3 as well.

Don't do this, why would it matter? The first step of the macro is export, once I've checked all the labels created by the macro, I save the project, export multiple, tag files and store on the NAS.

By the way, if you are comparing the overall loudness of your vinyl to CDs don't forget that it is quite possible that dynamic range compression was applied then the CDs were mastered. Not a good thing. (There is lots written about the loudness wars.)

Yes, it's pretty interesting to look at some of the CD versions of extended, re-mastered albums. Often the original tracks have not been compressed, and there at the end are the extra tracks, totally compressed. Weird....

I now have to work out how to migrate to a newer level of audacity, as they changed the way the macros work and I don't want to have to start over.

Thanks for taking time to reply John!