What's with all this clipping?

This is a (bad) audio engineering practice where you use a volume boost, then a compressor with a limiter. This causes a much higher volume level without clipping, but you lose a lot of the sound quality – the common term for this is the “loudness war.” As a producer, I do not like this – I would rather have high quality sound.

Vinyl doesn’t work the same, because it’s analog which means it can go over 0dB, which is one of the big things that folks are talking about when they say vinyl sounds better.

I’d probably only bother where the digital version is participating in the loudness wars, though.

But if you already own the vinyl, which was the position the OP was starting from, then it seems worth it to me.

I just dropped in and -admittedly – haven’t read the OP in detail, nor all replies.

Still, I have something to say about the OP. Somewhere you say you ripped your vinyls to digital. You then say you normalized your tracks, because clipping can cause distortion. Which is true by the way, clipping = distortion. Regardless of how audible it is (depending on many other factors) a clipped sound is effectively a block wave and that is no fun for any speaker (or ear for that matter).

However, all normalize does (especially in the lesser software like audacity) is adjusting volume so that average and peak are within specified limits. Other software (like Platinum Notes) use more sophisticated methods to normalize. Some software does destructive normalisation (i.e. it changes the actual sound) other non-destructive (typically what happens when you use normalize in DJ software) where it just adds a dB value in the gain correction field of the MP3 tags.

Normalized tracks are all “equally” loud. This means you’ll never be caught by surprise by a louder track (in real dB terms) if you forgot to gain the track while cueing it up. However normalisation does NOT do anything about the compression (as mentioned in an earlier reply). So, even two normalized tracks can sound different as far as loudness is concerned. Both WON’T clip (assuming you follow the golden “0dB Rulez-rule “throughout the signal path) and thus have no distortion.

A clipped track that you normalise, will sound just as distorted as a non-normalised track that is clipped, just at a lower volume!

The trick here is to have your base material unclipped. If you rip your own vinyl (CD’s is less of a problem because usually you don’t have to worry about levels in the digital to digital realm) or other analogue sources, it is so important to make sure there is enough headroom (i.e. don’t have the recording get close to maximum but keep a healthy margin). Once you have the digital track you could “re-master” the track by running some EQ (usually wise after a vinyl rip), maybe to tick/scratch/noise reduction (careful here) and probably some compression. I am not talking about loudness war levels, but just to make it fit in a bit better with the rest of your material.

A final note on expanders. They do work. So I don’t agree with Marco on compression being irreversible. Unlike compression (from WAV to lossy, not the audio kind) where materials is actually thrown away, audio compression is a mathematical trick. And because of that it can be reversed (to some extend). So with a good expander you do the exact opposite of compression. You make the less loud part less loud and you leave the loudest parts be. Result: the gap between low volume bits and loud bits becomes bigger and presto! bigger dynamic range. The big issue here is that you usually don’t know the original settings of the compression. If you knew those, you could actually get very close to the way the track sounded before compression, but that doesn’t happen much. So you’ll have to depend on your ears, use the most commonly used compression settings to set your expander, etx. It’s not optimal, but it is possible.

Just my two cents.