Normalize When Recording Vinyl?

[trademarq9]

I use Serato Scratch Live to DJ and I've been gradually transferring my vinyl to wav and mp3 format. EVERY forum I've read recommends normalizing tracks before exporting, but when I do so in Audacity it reduces the volume significantly. (And I thought normalizing was supposed to beef up the track. Am I doing something wrong?) Experimenting with a track that I had on vinyl and CD, I found that if I normalized the vinyl recording and THEN amplified it using the default option (3 dB) I could get the volume consistent with the CD and nearly identical in my headphones. The question is whether this is redundant, overkill, unnecessary, etc. and if the recorded track will sound acceptable at higher volumes (e.g. in a club). Any advice is appreciated.

[trademarq9]

Oh, and this is my means of recording...

Tech 1200 w/ Shure Whitelabels --> Denon x300 mixer --> M-Audio Firewire Solo --> Audacity 1.2.6 on 32-bit Vista.

[kozikowski]

In their auto modes, both Amplify and Normalize only work on the highest point in the song ignoring everything else. The difference between them is Stereo. Normalize increases or decreases each side independently until the highest point from both left and right reaches the setting you picked.

Amplify changes both left and right identically until the highest point on either one of them reaches your setting. I know this is at variance with how other packages work, and I've said so multiple times.

If the highest point on your song happens to be a cat hair click or pop, you lose. That could be why some of your production effects seem to be magic. The tools will simply not produce a predictable result if you have a noisy song.

All these tools ignore show loudness completely. The joke is the 1812 Overture. If you normalize that, the cannons at the end will take over and the orchestra might as well go home.

You are warned about comparing your vinyl work to the CD version. If they used even slightly different acoustical compression between the two mediums, you'll never get there. Volume variations in a vinyl performance are a very small fraction of what a Music CD can do.

In all cases, you need to avoid smacking 1 on the Audacity waveform view pretty much ever. That will produce unrecoverable damage and will sound like crunchy or overly crisp bass notes.

Koz

[trademarq9]

Koz,

Thanks for the reply. Do I understand correctly, then, that you would not recommend using either effect? Record as hot as possible without clipping and let it be? That has been my instinct, but virtually everything I've read includes normalizing as a standard step in archiving vinyl.

Tim

[kozikowski]

<<<Record as hot as possible without clipping and let it be?>>>

Hard to beat that.

<<<virtually everything I've read includes normalizing as a standard step in archiving vinyl.>>>

Archiving clean vinyl and that effect in Audacity is called Amplify, not Normalize. The Audacity Normalize tool will damage the stereo image.

Koz