As the title suggests, do you use sound normalization on your preferred streaming service and what do you think of it, are you for using it or against using it.
Personally I found that it makes music especially loud compressed music which is most of music, sound rather boring, I turned it off a long while ago and never looked back.
It’s true that it serves the purpose of leveling the playing ground between loud compressed music and more dynamic music, but since a huge amount of music is made loud and compressed it makes it unexciting since it turns it down and the music doesn’t have good dynamics so it sounds compressed and quiet rather than compressed and loud, also I can just turn up the volume for more quiet dynamic music
I don’t think Tidal is very good. You’re right, using normalization makes a lot of stuff duller but that’s just a volume perception thing. Tidal just adjusts it’s app volume setting, it doesn’t have internal processing to reduce the volume. Plus, some songs are unbearable with it off. I don’t know where they’re sourcing their music from but it’s horribly inconsistent. I have some 160kbps mp3s with better quality than the hifi version on Tidal.
I am using Spotify since it has good integration with Discord and it’s what everyone uses, also the premium quality is good enough imo since its 320kb, I listened to some flacs before and yes they do sound fuller but I think Spotify Premium quality is good enough.
Didn’t try Tidal, a friend of mine tried it and he said it sounds pretty good I plan on using Spotify for the forseable future, I’ve heard rumors that they might add FLAC quality in the future, but it’s just rumors for now
On Audirvana its called ReplayGain
Its legit awful and made me think my headphones were dying for a solid week
The Detail dies
The highs are rolled off really weird
Deep bass is crushed
it feels like heavy compression on the files
Replaygain shouldn’t do much to your music unless it’s already artificially amplified (or reduced). Well recorded songs shouldn’t be more than a few decibels off 89db, unfortunately you can find plenty that are off by 10 or more (one of my problems with Tidal). They will distort if you use any normalization.
