Mastering Above 0dB

No I understand what you are saying, I just disagree with you./PPMy feeling is anyone producing music should spend their time making the mix sound as good as possible. The ideal is when the mastering engineer gets it he/she needs to do very little to it apart from a bit of limiting. A good track well mixed should be the holy grail. /PPIf you want the track to be super loud then you need to spend a lot of time getting the mix right first. Actually if you want to preserve dynamic range and have a track that has a good loudness level (which, in my opinion you should) you need to do the same stuff in the mix.

Also what do you think happens if a DJ is bringing in a track that is a little quieter than the last one?/PPDid you know there arenbsp;7 knobs and 4 faders that control volume on the DJM-800?

Yes but again you are kind of arguing with yourself, because I’m not saying that trying to get your track super-duper loud is necessarily a good thing, and I’m not saying that i am desperate to get my tracks to the point where they are as loud as some other pro tracks.br
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I’m just stating that i find it interesting that the waveforms on alot of modern day tracks are so heavily limited almost to the point where nothing is ever very much below 0dB.br
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And a hell of a lot of other people find it interesting too because there is a pretty major debate that’s been ongoing for a while now about the ‘loudness war’.

[quote]TheAnt (10/09/2013)[hr]br
My feeling is anyone producing music should spend their time making the mix sound as good as possible. The ideal is when the mastering engineer gets it he/she needs to do very little to it apart from a bit of limiting. A good track well mixed should be the holy grail. br
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If you want the track to be super loud then you need to spend a lot of time getting the mix right first. Actually if you want to preserve dynamic range and have a track that has a good loudness level (which, in my opinion you should) you need to do the same stuff in the mix.[/quote]br
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this is perfect. also, Mastering isnt some magic dust that makes tracks sound professional. If you have a turd mix than your get a mastered turd, i know from experience in producing turds

[quote]TheAnt (08/09/2013)[hr]This is ridiculous, what do you think happens to you sound when you export it to a wav file? Do you think that is somehow saves it with +2db of sound? Just try and think what that would mean.br
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No, what it does it chop off everything that is above 0db. That is called digital clipping and it doesn’t sound nice on even the best systems in the world.br
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To show I exported a sine wave at 0db then at +2. This is what it does, notice how the top one has just been chopped off.br
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IMG src="http://forums.sonicacademy.com/Uploads/Images/c3dc0d89-8777-4cde-9f21-db2b.JPG"br
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This is a massive waste of you time. If you want distortion, add a plugin to do it. If you want it louder mix you tracks carefully, move stuff out of the way of the kick, and use a good quality limiter.[/quote]br
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I noticed there have been a few pages of replies, I can’t be bothered to read them all and write my reply because Ant has answered this in a nutshell! br
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:cool:

The overshoots only occur when Hi-Quality mode is enabled (it’s near the warp controls). With that enabled Ableton will interpret the waveform at it’s highest sample frequency giving rise to intersample peak distortion. This will happen a lot if clipping is involved. Essentially, if two neighbouring samples in the waveform are at 0db, so where clipping occurs, if the wave is going upwards very steeply towards the first sample and is coming down very steeply on the other side, Ableton may add samples between these points and end up reconstructing a peak that overshoots (especially if Ableton is internally resampleing, so if your audio engine is running at anything other than 44.1khz for CD WAV files, so all you 48/96/192khz people). Away from Ableton this also happens a lot during mp3 compression and in playback on some CD/audio players. br
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Hope this helps.