[Mike Rivers]

Bob Olhsson wrote:

The additional quantization caused by the gain change DOES damage the
audio quality!

EVERYTHING changes the audio quality. If a gain change is necessary
for aesthetic reasons (or perceived reasons) it does no more harm to
make that change using the Normalize function than to do it by manual
means, at least by the means that might be available to the casual
user.

The only time "normalization" can possibly buy you anything is in the
final D to A conversion. Otherwise it only adds noise or distortion if
you fail dither your gain change.

It's possible that dithering is automatic when normalizing with some
software. Generally when one finds the need to normalize, noise and
distortion aren't of as great concern as perceived volume, or more
likely, perceived meter readings or waveform graphic size.

Hey, I don't condone liberal use of the Normalize button, but if
you're going to make it loud and do it quickly, it gets the job done.
There are better ways to gain in the loudness war but they're often
out of reach, both technically and financially, from casual users.

It's always best to do it right when recording so there's no need for
normalizing. But we've come to encourage people to leave plenty of
headroom when recording, so some people are making recordings that
don't peak higher than -10 dBFS or so, and that's probably a good
thing in the overall scheme of things. Working at 24 bit resolution
(with the assumtion that proper dithering will be applied when they
burn the CD that they pass around to their friends or send in for
produdtion) there really isn't going to be a lot of harm done by
adding 6 dB of gain, and they'll feel better about it.