Re: sound juicer over-range
* Aubrey Raech <aubreyraech@gmail.com> [130307 04:15]:
> On Wed, 6 Mar 2013 23:14:47 +0000
> "Russell L. Harris" <rlharris@broadcaster.org> wrote:
...
>> It occurs to me that I could use an editor such as Audacity to
>> reduce the signal amplitude; but I do not know whether that
>> approach would give results which are sonically-pleasing.
...
> if you do want to reduce the amplitude of the entire audiobook, I
> think the easiest way to do this is with 'sox'. It wouldn't be hard
> to write a quick script to slightly reduce the amplitude of every
> track (ripped to .wav first perhaps with cdparanoia). In fact, when
> I rip audiobooks, I usually use sox to convert every track to mono
> and 22050hz, which isn't hard with a little bash.
I tend to be overly-cautious and not terribly prone to
experimentation; but here I suppose that the expenditure of an hour in
setup and experimentation on a track or two is in order.
Numerous authoritative sources warn of the dastardly effects of
over-range when using a digital recorder; this is one reason for a
general shift to 24-bit recorders over the past five years or so --
with a dynamic range of 24 bits, adjustment of the recording gain
becomes rather non-critical, because the dynamic range of music can be
captured accurately with less than 16 bits.
So I do not expect to discover that there is a good (much less, easy)
remedy (such as scaling the entire recording) for a recording which
has been made with the gain set too high. Rather, I expect to find
that when a 16-bit recorder receives a peak for which 16 bits is
inadequate, the samples in the neighbourhood of the peak somehow are
not recorded properly, with the result that the sound is irreparably
"scrubbled".
RLH
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