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RB181 t1_je23m2c wrote

Reply to comment by CrelbowMannschaft in What music service do you guys use? by dpalma9

Volume normalization reduces dynamic range, which can only be a detriment to sound quality. I can't think of a reason to use normalization on any device which provides fine-grained volume control (although, Android is still lacking in this department). It's also not a Spotify-exclusive feature, AFAIK any streaming service I've tried had the option to turn on normalization (not that I've used it).

Spotify used to be king when it comes to catalog size and UI but at this point I find that the competition has very much caught up to them, and there's also the matter that they're one of the worst when it comes to artist payouts. Even if you don't care about audio quality, I find it hard to justify using Spotify in this day and age.

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CrelbowMannschaft t1_je26ljs wrote

Patently false. It does not reduce dynamic range in normal or quiet mode. https://artists.spotify.com/help/article/loudness-normalization

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RB181 t1_je29f5r wrote

I wasn't aware that Spotify had some sort of "smart" normalization going on but my point still stands. Normalization can only reduce audio quality by reducing dynamic range, not enhance quality, so there's little reason to use it if you have a functioning volume control.

I could also go on a tangent about how using normalization at a low volume level (which is essentially the same as reducing the volume in the Spotify app) is worse than keeping Spotify volume at max and controlling the volume via the OS mixer or an analog knob, but that's beside the point.

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ultra_prescriptivist t1_je28wqt wrote

In most cases, normalization doesn't affect dynamic range at all; all it does is adjust the volume to a pre-defined level (measured in LUFS).

Spotify is different from other streaming services because Premium users can select different normalisation levels - quiet, normal, and loud.

The funny thing is that "Loud" here doesn't always mean that normalization turns the perceived volume up. If a track was mastered fairly loud already, enabling normalization and setting it to Loud may even drop the volume. You can see this on Daft Punk's Give Life Back to Music. Notice also how the shape of the waveform stays the same, since no dynamic range compression is being applied.

However, the one situation where the normalization setting does affect dynamic range is when we have a track with high dynamic range that was mastered relatively quietly and we set the normalization to Loud. The problem now is that the loud parts of the track might be pushed too high and cause clipping, so a limiter has to be applied to ensure that we don't get distortion. This applies to most classical music, such as this recording of Mahler's 5th Symphony.

Notice how the Normal setting looks the same as having normalization switched off but the Loud setting has compressed the track significantly, going from a DR (dynamic range) value of 12 to around 6.

For Spotify users who want to avoid any dynamic range compression, leaving normalization enabled and set to the Quiet or Normal settings is fine - they just need to be careful when having it set to Loud when listening to certain types of music.

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