[linux-audio-user] Distortion -- bad speakers or cheap soundcard?

[davidrclark at earthlink.net]

Hi Ron,

You recently posted:

> Anyway, I jumped all over David's proposal. The topic
> is a pet peve of mine and I'm on a personal mission.

Would you be so kind as to explain to me exactly what it is that you
think I've proposed?  I regard my post as stating the obvious:  A newbie
in audio isn't going to be able to compete in loudness with someone with
experience at it.  If they were available, I could pull your own posts
with ample evidence of frustration regarding making a track even louder
than you thought was possible.  Do you remember those days?

And also: I'm sure you're familiar with Bob Katz's book, so I cannot help
but wonder why you also posted:

> The objective of mastering is to achieve the maximum
> amount of loudness for each song on an album and to
> make the loudness of each song relative to the others.

It would seem that you and Katz are at odds here. You're also at odds
with some of the best names in the audio industry, aren't you?  In Katz's
book, there are lots of tricks for fixing all sorts of problems that 
apparently slipped by the recording and mixing engineers in many projects.
Just one example: Cross-fading a reverb tail to replace an audience applauding
at the end of a classsical music performance.  As far as I'm concerned,
making things loud is about squeezing 24-bit audio into 12-bit resolution 
for a 16-bit medium.  Some things sound OK like that; many don't --- not
to me, anyway.

Regards,
Dave.