Normalizing & Hard Limiters

W

WFVoiceover

New member
Hello everyone. First post and getting used to sound recording in general.
Recently, I have put together a home studio in a spare room, which is dead enough and have no real noise issues.

The main purpose of the room is to record audiobooks.
At this stage, I am cleaning up the recordings and the EQ seems to be fine. They are loud enough for me to hear with headphones on. At the moment, through no logic other than guess work, I hard limit the whole recording to -6dB as I recalled someone telling me that I should have the final product sitting around the middle of the yellow band on the meter.

This works fine for me, but the question is....should I instead just normalize the audio to -1 or 0 dB in order to ensure that listeners in a louder environment like on a subway for instance, get maximum bang for their buck?
Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Thank you for your advice.
 
After you have compressed/limited the audio to your satisfaction then normalize ( global boost ) it to just under 0.


Check out CoolEditPro ( free version still available somewhere ). The included compression presets also serve as a guide on how to compress for various styles.
 
Thank you all for your advice.

But I am a little confused between two posts.
If I hard limit to -1dB, does this leave all the levels at different rates as opposed to normalizing to -1dB which would bring the lows up to a more listenable level?......or have I got this all wrong?
 
A bit of background here since the differences between normalisation and hard limiting are important here.

In normalisation, you tell your software what level you want the loudest peak of your track to be. The software puts it there and applies exactly the same amount of gain to the whole track. This means that a single high peak determines the maximum level for the whole file--the place where you bumped the mic 47 minutes in can mean that the rest of the audio book might sit at -15dBFS.

With hard limiting, you have two things to enter: the maximum level you'll let the track go to (usually right up near 0dBFS) and the amount of gain you want to add. Done this way, your software will apply a hard limiter just below clipping but let you determine how much gain to add. Done this way, you can look at your track, see that there are a few random peaks at near 0dB but that most of the speech is peaking at around -6. You can set the limiter to -0.1dB and apply 6dB of gain to bring all your levels up to near max by limiting the random peaks. Basically you're using a compressor but determining threshold and ratio yourself rather than settings on a knob. It also means that the gain is constant so no pumping on background noise.

You're right to want your levels to be closer to commercial recordings for listening in noisy conditions so yyou probably want the final level up to near 0dB--people hate adjusting their volume controls!. The "keep it lower" advice applies to the production process rather than a final distribution copy. If you've already hard limited, then normalising upwards (to, say, -0.1dB or maybe a couple tenths of a dB lower) will be all you need to do.
 
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