On Tidal I would like to turn on “Loudness normalization”, but I’m worried it will lessen the quality of the sound.
I listen to a lot of music, some songs are older, so they are more quiet, and some songs that are made recently, sound louder. Because of this I always have to adjust the volume knob on my headphone amp.
If all my songs are at the same volume would that theoretically decrease audio quality if the songs you are listening too have vastly different in dynamics?
The normalization doesn’t compress the dynamic range so it doesn’t decrease the quality, in software at least.
However, as the gain of loud songs decreases, you need to turn the volume up so the noise of the system increases (if you use analog volume control). That can decrease the playback quality.
If you use digital volume control, use Tidal’s normalization. If you use analog volume control, you may want to disable it to get the best theoretical quality.
More info:
Two kinds of normalization are LUFS and peak. LUFS is what Tidal uses which is much better in term of actual normalization. It reduces the gain of loud songs so all the songs have the same loudness.
Peak normalization increases the gain of the songs to the point where the loudest parts of the songs are at 0dbfs.
Peak normalization doesn’t make the songs have the same loudness as good as LUFS. What it does is to give the loudest signal possible so the noise of the system reduces as much as possible.
Personally, I use peak normalization since my system has analog volume control. So I want the loudest signal, to turn the volume knob as down as possible, to get the lowest noise, thus the highest dynamic range.