Jriver mc19 volume levelling

[Rothchild]

Just repeated experiment with a track from the first Beautiful South album (Sail this ship alone) which has spades of headroom (indeed the highest peak is -3.1dB) and there's a good 14dB of dynamic range. Same result.

Also a salutory lesson in the precision that this test is able to muster. I sample align the files by eye, I pick an obvious feature in the wave and line it up, gradually zooming in until I'm at single sample resolution and happy that it's right. At first it wouldn't quite cancel so I thought I'd got the alignment wrong, so I nudged the track one sample along and the cancellation failed completely. When I set it back and set the volume by typing in the actual figure I wanted (rather than moving the fader which was jumping me between -3.38 and -3.42) then the cancellation happened properly.

[Peter Stockwell]

see if I can make a different result, but this initial test seems to indicate that any difference people are hearing is more likely down to the gainstaging of their Hi-Fi chain and is not a product of volume change being applied to the file per-se.

Rats! Hate to read that kind of research. I'll try it again, but be more adventurous with volume.

[Peter Stockwell]

Rats! Hate to read that kind of research. I'll try it again, but be more adventurous with volume.

With a freer hand with the volume control, I now can't hear anything untoward with R128 volume equalization. I didn't expect that!

[realysm42]

Interesting stuff Marc, thanks for doing that so quickly.

So your conclusion is that its our systems volume not being perfect, instead of the volume levelling being damaging?

[Rothchild]

More or less,

What I think it shows is that the volume levelling system is doing nothing but turning the gain down as it re-plays the file (by a fixed amount per song). Because (as I mentioned earlier) digital gain changes are 'free' this causes no difference to the quality of the file (if the tone or dynamic range had been changed I would not be able to phase cancel the file; in previous tests I've satisfied myself that tone (EQ) change of as small as 0.1dB at any frequency was detectable using this test).

So, the current 'best guesses' are that; the differences heard are caused by either the knock-on effect of driving lower gain in the rest of the system and the altered gain structure having and impact or, potentially, that: Once you put over-compressed (over-loud) material up against well mastered material in a volume matched way then the game is up for loudness wars mastering. All of a sudden the Emperor is naked! (there's no depth, there's distortion and clipping, transients are softened etc etc)

One further comment to make is that I was quite surprised at just how much gain was coming off to achieve the 23LUFs 'Broadcast' standard, the final level looked even less than K20 on my meter. If it weren't for this aspect I'd be more inclined to go with my second theory about the difference but it strikes me that the first may still be plausable in certain systems due to the reduced voltage being driven in to them.