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Pretty good article, but of course he doesn't say why it is harder to make hot tracks loud(er) while it is easier with track with lots of headroom.

My take: You use some kind of compression/limiter to make things loud at the end. If everything is too hot, then the "brick wall" limiter does all the work and everything gets squashed and you lose dynamics and clarity. If you have headroom, then the compressor does most of the work and the limiter only kicks in at a few transient peaks.

Well, I think that is what happens. But I don't really know for sure. I mean you could just slide the faders down and "create headroom" -- but I don't think that works as well. Ya know, I think I have hit the 0dB of my knowledge on this subject.



I DON'T user compression/limiter until the very last step if at all.

Think about this. If you have a quiet piano track, once you pull that slider all the way up or right (depending on your screen view) you are done. That's as loud as you can go. That's where I would start boosting 2db at a time to see if that created enough headroom.

And that is why I prefer to record hot. I can slide that puppy down to nothing if I want to, but I can only go so high before there is no more "high" to go to.