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A 'perfect' iTunes equalizer setting
Authored by: bakalite on Sep 02, '04 01:51:04PM

As someone who used to own a recording studio, I'd like to make a couple of comments.

First off, the poster who mentioned that this setting makes everythign louder is right. The downside is that this may put some stuff over the top and you'll get distortion. If you do use a settine that makes everything louder, use the preamp slider to bring the overall volume back down.

Second, on the subject of some bands recording their songs "at a higher volume", you really can't. All forms of digital audio have a maximum number that any sound can be, and you can't go above that. What you can do, is compress the sound so more of it will be up there. Unfortunately overusing this makes everything sound terrible, and produces "ear fatigue". It's like instead of eating a nice meal followed by a nice dessert, you have a gallon of chocolate ice cream every time.

Finally, our ears get used to different EQ settings. This is why some guys have the bass all the way up and the loudness engaged on their stereo. To someone with a set of ears, this sounds terrible, but they are used to it.

If you want better sound, I recommend encoding the signal at a higher bit rate and using superior encoders. After that, I'd just adjust the hardware EQ slightly on the stereo if needed.



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A 'perfect' iTunes equalizer setting
Authored by: spegis on Sep 02, '04 02:54:06PM

When Public enemy came out They were most likely recording in analog as apposed to tday's almost all digital world of music recording. And if I'm correct, with analog recording at a higher level of volume leads to a distortion effect often used by bands and now simulated by digital filters for effect on songs. THough I could very well be wrong.



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A 'perfect' iTunes equalizer setting
Authored by: Shawn Parr on Jun 05, '05 07:22:52PM

This is an old thread, and probably won't be seen, but:

On analog tape and most mixers, pushing the levels hard not only brings in distortion, but by the very nature of distortion, compression/limiting as well.

Plus in the early 90's the Waves L1 was available to quite a lot of studios to do digital mastering and squash the heck out of things.

Most likely when you hear people saying that they recorded it louder, the are confused and mean it was made louder in mastering - which as bakalite mentioned is done via compression/limiting.



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