What are some well-mastered cd's?
Reply #121 – 2008-04-19 15:08:43
Interestingly, 4 of your 6 albums (nearly 5) are within 1dB of the 89dB target. If that's so, could replaygain information be used to determine if an album is well mastered, or perhaps, poorly mastered? (is sorting by album gain possible?) No. Replaygain is affected by the style of music. An extremely high RG-Value (above -6db) quite reliably tells that a record was dynamically compressed for loudness. However, an album may easily reach -5dB replaygain, without making use of "compression for the sake of loudness". Simply take a track or album, which has reduced dynamics by definition - i.e. albums with lots of reverb and effects, or albums with constant strings in the background. Even ambient albums - the music style which by definition is "anti-loudness"... often reaches -5dB, simply because loudness is very constant and the album gets of course normalized. And all this happens before it even gets into mastering stage. So in short - RG values up to -6dB can, but do not necessarily, indicate dynamic overcompression - since in that range, the style of music can have a strong effect on RG, even if the track was just peaknormalized. If however we get above -6dB, it is very probable that the music was intentionally dynamically overcompressed for loudness. P.S.: Also take into account that RG is not perfect. It can easily miscalculate actual perceived loudness by +/- 2dB - in rare cases even up to +/- 4dB.