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Volume level of commercial CD's.

Originally I could only play CD's directly on my CD player. A while ago I got a Sony Blu-ray player that can feed FLAC files to my dac. After converting several CD tracks to FLAC, I see that many are so loud that my preamp barely goes past 9 o'clock. In order to readjust the volume to have the preamp at 12 o'clock, I started converting the CD rips to wav and then using the Wavegain program and converting back to FLAC. Now the volume is much more adjustable on the preamp and it looks like a good solution to me, except for the hassle of having to run everything through Wavegain.

Is this the best solution?

rff000
fuzztone's avatar
fuzztone
5,629 posts
 

Sounds like a problem with your conversion program. I recommend xrecode. Your CDs have commercials?

rff000 OP
23 posts
 

There is no problem that I see with conversion. The CD's themselves play too loud and so do the FLACS that I rip. I think the mastering is just too loud for my system but Wavegain improves the volume.

Interestingly, I have a bedside radio with a weak amp and the loud FLACS sound fine there. The problem comes with my big system (Jolida tube dac and Conrad-Johnson 250 watt amp), where the volume knob has to be at a very low setting.

fuzztone's avatar
fuzztone
5,629 posts
 

CDs don’t play too loud. Compared to what?

Your system is too sensitive. Attenuate it.

Run them through a DAC with a gain control.

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