Normalize Vs Volume increase Options

[tinpanalley]

I'm having trouble figuring out which of the two is better for me to create a vinyl recording at the highest volume without clipping.

I capture a record via my preamp into Audacity, and I get what seem to be relatively low levels even though I make sure the levels are right when I record (Peak: -6.4db, RMS -24.6db). Am I doing something wrong? Or are those levels right? These recordings don't seem as loud as mastered CDs.

Anyway, to get the most accurate sound possible, should I use normalize or just increase the volume? If normalizing makes everything sound the same at a peak level, doesn't that completely screw with the dynamic range of the music?

Thanks!

[AndyH-ha]

Perhaps I am just too ignorant of what is involved. The waveform is displaced by some amount from zero. This is normally caused by a DC voltage on the analogue signal line. It exist in the analogue signal. When converting to digital it is retained as a numerical component of each sample value. The file can be copied elsewhere, within the computer or to another, and the offset does not go away.

Since there is a way to detect and remove it in an editor, there has to be a way to add it where it did not originally exist. In a digital recording it is just another part of what makes up the sample, in a sense like 60Hz hum. It doesn't matter whether it was actually caused by DC where there should have been none, or by something else.

Also, I don't seen any reason there could not be a DC voltage on the signal line going into the cutting amplifier, adding an offset to the recording being fed to it. However, I take it by your extreme example that cutting the signal to disk would effectively remove the offset. I can see there is no reference available on the LP but if this means the signal becomes what it would have been had there been no offset to begin with, then either
What I 've found on a few LP recordings is actually something else that just happens to look the same or
my system somehow, very infrequently, glitches just for the duration of one LP.

I never gave it any thought before. The few times it was there I just removed it. Since most of my recordings show no such problem, I did not consider the odd, very infrequent case a sign that my equipment was acting up, any more than I thought the clicks and pops were the fault of my system rather than the condition of the LP.