Recording Vinyl into Reaper - Maximizing volume?

[yougots2chill]

Im in the process of ripping vinyl into Reaper for my DJ gigs. Im recording at 24/48 at about -10db and I wanna bring up the volume without ruining the music thats already mastered. Normalizing the track wont make it loud enough! Whats the best way to maximize the volume of my vinyl rips without killing the dynamics and keeping everything natural? Clippers? slight limiting? Cant find any info on this online so any help or anyone with experience would be much appreciated.

Im using the phono input on my MPC Live straight into Reaper

[nofish]

Originally Posted by yougots2chill

Normalizing the track wont make it loud enough!

This part I don't follow.
If you use it for DJing wouldn't it just be a matter of turning up the input gain of your DJ mixer / the power amp of the sound system?

Apart from that, if you've already normalized, to make it louder without clipping there's no way other than to reduce dynamics (e.g. limiter, clipper as you mentioned.).

[ashcat_lt]

Are you sure that the loudest peak in the file is actually part of the music and not just one of those random pops and clicks and crackles that vinyl makes because it's an ancient technology?

Can you not find a digital source for this material?

[serr]

The max dynamic range from vinyl with a great pressing and audiophile setup is around 70db. If you had a $10,000 setup to achieve that, even 16 bit digital format would capture that dynamic range and normalizing should produce a hotter volume. (Goes without saying to use 24 bit to more accurately preserve the lower levels but that wasn't the bullet point there.) A DJ quality rig is going to be more around 45db dynamic range. (Pretty flattened and easy to capture.)

So... something is wrong.

Do you at least have a DJ quality RIAA preamp for that turntable? Plugging a phono output directly to a line level input would be a gross enough impedance mismatch that you'd have a very anemic sounding result even with peak levels apparently still in the window.

That's my first guess anyway.

Edit: Just noticed the part where you noted the phono input on your audio interface.
Alright then.

Could be some artifact peaks from some dirt or damage. You'd kind of see those in the waveforms though and answer your own question there. If you had an inexpensive DJ cartridge and table along with that interface, I'd expect a dulled and somewhat compressed sound coming in but not just out in left field too quiet. I'd need to see samples to speculate more.

If this is truly stuff that isn't available digitally... do the best with what you have.
If this IS stuff available digitally... might be more bang for the buck to hunt down those copies. Top quality analog gear like this is outrageously expensive and the quality really nosedives with the cheaper stuff.

[alanofoz]

Originally Posted by ashcat_lt

Are you sure that the loudest peak in the file is actually part of the music and not just one of those random pops and clicks and crackles that vinyl makes because it's an ancient technology?

My thoughts exactly. In my experience the highest peak when recording vinyl is extremely likely to be a random click, and that will determine the normalised level. Thus normalising will result in reduced levels for the music.

[DVDdoug]

Normalizing does NOT make tracks equally "loud". Lots of quiet-sounding songs have 0dB normalized peaks.


If you want to match the loudness you can use ReplayGain, or WaveGaoin or MP3gain, etc. But, since the quiet-sounding songs can't go louder without clipping these tools tend to make most of your music quieter.


Ignoring the clicks & pops issue, there are two reasons that normalized (digitized) vinyl may not sound as loud as digital music:


If you have older records from the analog days, they didn't have modern-digital compression & limiting so they were often more dynamic. There was a loudness war, and they did have compression (and you can get compression/limiting simply by over-driving tape) but you couldn't get the same loudness as modern methods.


The vinyl cutting and playback process operates like an all-pass filter. The all-pass filter effect changes the wave shape making some peaks higher and other peaks lower. The new higher-peaks make a higher crest-factor (peak-to-average ratio) without affecting the sound of the dynamics. And, that gives the vinyl a lower average when normalized than the normalized original. (MP3 does something similar, boosting some of the peaks and making a higher apparent dynamic range.)

[serr]

Oh yeah, that's a good point if you're comparing vinyl to some volume war CD. Some of those CDs are jacked up as much as an additional 10db with limiting vs the vinyl.