what the hell is going on?

S

sludgehammer

New member
We recorded a band in our home studio. during mixdown (to computer) everything sounded good over the monitors and over headphones. Playba ck from the computer sounded fine too, as did playback on my diskman. Then I took the disk to give to the band as a master. They put it in their car stereo and it totally fuzzed out the left speaker, one of the guitars sounded like frying bacon. I tried it in another stereo and got the same thing. The other guitar sounds loud and clear but the left channel guitar sounds crappy. The recording was normalized etc in Soundforge to 0db. Could it just be too hot for some stereo outputs? Should I bring it down a couple of db? It's done this 3 mixes in a row and it's driving me crazy.
 
i usually normalise to -12db in soundforge. If im feeling pretty ballsy, the -6. never 0.

xoxo
 
Really? Why is that? I thought you were supposed to take it as close to zero as you can get it. Does zero in Soundforge = more than zero? Thanks for the tip though, I'll pull it back a bit and see what happens.
 
don't normalize it - compress it through a waves ultramaximiser with a ceiling of -2. it's much better!!
 
there are two types of normalization in sound forge.i think camm is referring to the normalize to rms function while you are referring to normalize to peak level.the normalize to rms determines the average level,which is what makes the cd really loud.normalize to peak level just finds the loudest peak and turns it up as high as you tell it to,so if you have one or two large peaks sticking up several db over the rest of the tune,it may not get very loud at all. if you were to normalize to 0 db rms,you would remove all the dynamic range and wind up with a giant square wave.i usually normalize to rms average then normalize peak to about 95% of max to give it a little headroom to play with. i found out approx what to normalize to by recording some commercial cd samples in and looking at the rms loudness stats.i have found that rms settings of -14 to - 10 work well depending on the type of music i am mastering.if you have cool edit pro,check the stats there,they seem to be more accurate on my computer,anyway.another neat trick i use with cool edit pro is to mix into the pc at 32 bit,do my final eq touchups etc.,normalize to about 97% of peak to take advantage of the dynamic range then dither to 16 bits and normalize to rms in sound forge and do a couple of paragraphic tricks sometimes.i hope i have been of some assistance,i just joined the site tonite,looking forward to some interesting discussions..........les
 
Thanks guys, I'll give that a shot. I've been normalizing to peak level after mixing a pretty blocky looking wave onto the computer. I don't want to compress it much because it starts sounding wierd. I don't really have a lot of peaks to deal with after doing a little limiting. I brought the whole thing down to -6db and it does sound a little better though. Now i'm wondering if it's just some wierd frequency thing happening due to a fairly crappy sounding "garage rock" guitar tone? I don't have cool edit pro so I can't try that stuff. I do have Wavelab though, any tricks garnished from there?
 
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