If I may dude, let me do my best to expand and explain my conclusions.
"What's that all about" are my 30 years of audio schooling here in the film, motion picture, and cue industry here in Hollywood. What's that all about" are my good fortunes to have worked (in the early days) with the incomparable Michael Omartian and his equally talented son Chris. Who by the way came to the same conclusions as I. These conclusions not only covered normalizing audio but also concluded the "maximizing" process equally degraded the original audio. "What's that all about" are my 23 Emmy wins and my 4 Pro-Max wins. What's that all about" are my fun and fond days at the Radford Lot in Studio City creating cues (and long-form cues) for the amazingly creative, brilliantly written, daytime drama, "
Passions". "What's that all about" are my oh-so-challenging days working on and for the Ellen DeGeneres show. "What's that all about" was my battle for survival with Sony Pictures who have the single most picky and demanding Project Coordinators on the planet. "What's that all about" is, above all, I learned beyond every conceivable measuring stick, that mixing audio is singular and distillable to using one's ears.
In the end, I hope I've managed to move the understanding yardstick perhaps an inch further than, "I have no idea what he's talking about" At this point, I'd consider that a mild win.
This, like most forums, are melting pots of ideas and notions. That's really how it should be. What's perhaps odd or beyond the lines just may well produce mightily in the future. It has for me. I've submitted what I believe in, and that belief is based on 10 hours a day. 6 or 7 days a week, for 30 years. This post was received with an obvious "are you dumb" reception. In the end, I never post with any grandiosos, not my M.O. It would appear however that this group has surpassed my learnings and distilled me to nonsensical. I'll gladly slink away and yield. Perhaps to a forum more on my level. Is there a forum called "Audio for dummies"? I'll leave this place to the more enlightened and let the big guns have at it.