Master Peak Levels

-6dB seems a tad on the quiet side.

My own "mastered" material peaks at -0.3dB, though -0.1dB is quite common from some of the wavs I've seen on Soundcloud & other sites.

Thank you Jeff and Bristol, that clears things up hugely!!!

It's unlikely you'd hear a perceptible difference in volume if your file's highest peak was at -0.1db versus -1.0db. Try it yourself and see.  

That is what I thought too Dave until I was mastering an album a while ago and the client was pushing for as much volume as possible. I found that there was a obvious noticeable difference between setting the upper peak limit to -0.1 compared to -1 dB for sure. It was louder and you could hear it. I think it depends on the type of material. 

With Jazz and other styles that don't need as much limiting you can still have peaks going up high as much as -1dB or higher even but what they don't do in these situations is push the rms value so hard.  Instead of going for an average rms level of say -7dB a high end Jazz production may even stay around -14 or 12 dB rms instead which sounds better and can breath a bit better in terms of transients and dynamics. (thank god for some sanity here or normality!)

Steely Dan's 'Everything Must Go' CD is sitting around -12dB rms the whole time which is rather nice and yes it sounds great! And that is more pop too which is a little unusual. Some of Kurt Rosenwinkels CD's (modern Jazz guitarist and incredibly good at that too!) have been pushed a little and are a little loud but they don't sound that way though. Most decent Jazz recordings are mastered at a decent respectable level which is great. 

Dave maybe not! In the PSP Xenon you can leave the input level raising amount alone but change the output limit only from say -0.1 dB to -1 dB. When you are doing this you are not increasing the amount of loudness the limiter is giving you but merely changing the output limiting level. You can still hear it when this happens.

But in a way what you are also saying is true because if you allow all the material to extend up another 0.9 dB then it must be said that the music is now containing energy that is extending up another 0.9 dB. This is what I meant by depending on the material and how hard you are pushing things too. 

If you were not pushing things that hard and there was not much extra energy in that extra 0.9 dB then you are right you would not hear any difference.

Well Ben that is interesting. Personally I think even that is very high. There is still something to be said for staying well clear of a lot of converters that might still have trouble sounding good at -0.2 dB max level.  A good upper limit might be -1dB but then you are loosing some volume when you do this. How silly all this is when we can should be well clear of any of these levels.
(And we have got a whole whopping 96 dB of available range below it even at 16 Bit!)

I am thinking of enrolling in the Masters of Music technology at Newcastle Uni ! What do you think. Would you recommend it? 

I agree. Think about how small a half a decibel is when you're mixing. I normally don't even bother with half-db tweaks when mixing. If it doesn't need a full db, it doesn't need anything.

The problem with pushing right up against the ceiling is that you leave no room for intersample peaks, which can be as much as 3db over the highest peak your meters register. This is exacerbated by MP3 encoders' high-Q filters. So if it's a choice between compromising fidelity and making the listener turn the volume knob up half a decibel...

And anyway, who are you competing with, trying to squeeze the last db possible? All your competitors on the radio?

Jeff Evans


Well Ben that is interesting. Personally I think even that is very high. There is still something to be said for staying well clear of a lot of converters that might still have trouble sounding good at -0.2 dB max level.  A good upper limit might be -1dB but then you are loosing some volume when you do this. How silly all this is when we can should be well clear of any of these levels.
(And we have got a whole whopping 96 dB of available range below it even at 16 Bit!)

I am thinking of enrolling in the Masters of Music technology at Newcastle Uni ! What do you think. Would you recommend it? 
 
We've had this disscussion before Jeff, the one about enrolling in the masters course at The University of Newcaste that is and I am glad we can put our differences behind us too.  My advice is this, I am still unemployed and it doesn't look like changing in the near future whether this is due to my attitude or being over qualified, (which I am now, for the grunt jobs in the audio/music industry) it's probably a little of both but the course hasn't enhanced my resume.  On saying that if you want a useless title (yes I know it is a part of my monkier) and the possibilty of a better paid job, then do it.  It won't teach you much that you don't already know, unless you want to learn Flash or to get a bit of research under your belt.  The one thing it does give you though is good resources, such as books and a copy of Flash if you did the Flash course and these are part of the course fees.  But I'm ambivalent about the merits of the course.
 
Peace Ben 

I also picture the scenario wherein the listener has put my track in a playlist, say, and the track before it peaks at -0.1dB, then mine comes along peaking at -1dB or less (which I may have kept that way in order to maintain audio fidelity and what have you) and the listener just skips ahead because it lacks the energy (volume) of the previous track

I understand completely. But this is exactly the trap so many fall into: the belief that 1 decibel in peak values will make the difference between being competitive or not. 

I also just did an analysis of Tom Petty's Refugee... I think it is a masterpiece of sorts so it seemed like a good example to mention.

It has less than a dozen peaks over -3dBFS with one hitting -1.3dBFS max.

Most of the peaks don't go above -4dBFS.

In other words, the peaks are, well... the peaks are actually peaks. :-)



OH BTW, unlike the other 2 examples... the Tom Petty .mp3 also has zero DC offset... you'd think someone could fix that on the other 2 tracks.

I think it might have been mastered by an actual mastering engineer.





Refugee sounds plenty loud when I play it.

Knowing that there are great songs like that out there bolster my opinion that I can get away with peaking at -1dBFS and happily disregard any opinions that the mix isn't loud enough.





Heck, that is one reason I have monitors with adequate power amplification ... so I can easily demonstrate to guests how loud a mix can seem.




best regards,
mike

 

radio uses broadcast limiters, all set the same.

it will take the input from any source (cd) and make it just as loud as anything else.

the problem is trying to match that kind of limiting as a final product for a cd.
this is the wrong way to go about things.


a well-mastered pro release, will sound good on the radio.

a home made master, usually will sound pretty crappy on the radio.

even if the levels on both cd's are the SAME...... it's the WAY the pro release is mastered, that makes it sound superior when put thru ANOTHER level of limiting.

home-mastered tracks that have the low end dialed in pretty good, but do not have the high end properly adjusted, will sound bright, splatty, a bit harsh, when put thru the radio limiter.

that radio limiter, is the thing that brings all poor mastering to light.

Just a quick FYI, the mp3 scoping is never correct....all mp's I've ever scoped out had "possibly clipped samples" as well as DC's. Something in the conversion causes this. Try it with one of your own songs and you'll see what I mean. You may not get  the possibly clipped samples at -1dB or the DC offsets, but if you were to master out at -0.1 dB (anything -0.3 or louder will do it) then convert to mp3, you'd see the DC's as well as the PCS's.

Another thing to keep in mind, if you're using Adobe Audition to scan in, it has a sensitive level of threshold for scoping that stuff out, which I like..but sometimes it is literally giving you false alarms. For example, sometimes it will show PCS's yet your LED meter will never flash in the red.

My point is...don't put too much stock into scoping mp3's. If you had the same song in wav format, the numbers would change pretty drastically. I'll give you an example in case anyone thinks I'm out of my tree. :)

Philip posted a song we did on the song forum called "So Long". Here are the stats for both the wave and the mp3. The mp3 was converted directly from this wave file using Wave Lab. Notice how the statistics have changed? The wave is 16/44. The mp3 I've chose is 320 kb, constant bit rate, slow encoding.

Wave File:

View in browser: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4909348/SoLongWaveStats.jpg

Mp3 File:

View in browser: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/4909348/SoLongMp3Stats.JPG

See? The results are quite different. Scanning both the wave and the mp3 in Wavelab gives me even different results. So never put too much stock into mp3's. They will always give you a false representation/misrepresentation every time. :)

-Danny

It looks like it ended up with 14 something-like-intersample peaks and the noise floor came up a bit.


best regards,
mike

Here's an old thread on the topic of headroom for MP3s, with some pictures: http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=1689770

The final level of the master is only as important as the amount of compression used to achieve it. A -0.1db level which has been compressed lightly will still sound quieter than achieving that level through a 10:1 compression ratio and low threshold. Whether it sounds better or worse is another matter.
 
If your song has all the sonic quality it needs, and you want to retain air and dynamics, then push it up to around -1db with light compression and the quality will shine through

There are a few loudness "standards" which most people tend to ignore.   -20dB RMS for classical, -14 to -12 dB for dynamic pop and jazz.  In reality, for popular music, the audio usually gets squashed to -6 to -4 dB RMS.  This is the dynamic range of the music, and keeping in mind that 1dB is considered the smallest noticeable volume change, most popular music today just sounds like a loud wall of sound.  
 
For peaks, when I started out the standard was -0.3dB.  This was only to prevent inter-sample peaks during the DA stage, it has nothing to do with the loudness level of the recording and it is irrellevant if the peak is set to -.2, -.3, or -1,  they all will have the same perceived average loudness.  With modern peak limiters that have oversampling, this is not an issue and the music can be mastered to 0.0dB without a problem, but to avoid error messages for Red Book mastering you need to drop the output to -0.2dB.