Editor: I just wanted to add a brief comment to Steve Guttenberg's editorial in the November issue of Stereophile. I think he misunderstood Bob Katz, or maybe Bob and I didn't get it across well enough: Nobody will prevent you from squashing or clipping the sound. The only thing loudness-normalization does is to take away any loudness "advantage" you typically also get from applying such processing. Therefore, compression, limiting, clipping etc. still should and will remain an artistic decision.
Today, the guy applying such processing just ought to compare results loudness-normalized, ie, judge the sound, not the absolute loudness. I also wanted to make that clear in the October 2014 AES Convention in Los Angeles, so one of my slides this year looked like the image below.—Thomas Lund, HD Development Manager, TC Electronics A/S, Denmark
