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[Bernhard]

Was there a change in playback volume in one of the latest updates of MC26?
It is now much lower that other non HDCD albums.

[Bernhard]

I saw the changelog, and it confirms a change in .75
Nevertheless it is definitely lower than other albums and for my understanding too low.
I have to turn up volume now to levels, I never needed in the past. Party time excluded.

[Matt]

Volume levelling will apply a six decibel shift.  Our output wasn't matching the standard tool so we changed.

[Matt]

We were applying a 6 dB shift to make the level match the input.

But then we tried HDCD.exe (the standard command line tool) and it was not shifted.

We also had reports of clipping.

So the shift was removed from HDCD playback.

Volume levelling will add 6 dB back if you use it.

[Bernhard]

Hi Matt,

thanks for reply.
My understanding is, this should not be a general approach. Let me add what specification tells: https://web.archive.org/web/20050205170338/http://hdcd.com/partners/proaudio/GainScale.pdf

Probably we are using two different types of HDCD files for our Tests. 

[Matt]

The standard tool on this is HDCD.exe.  It's here:
https://github.com/bp0/libhdcd/releases/download/v1.4/libhdcd-win-1.4.zip

HDCD will now be lower volume than the corresponding not HDCD processed files.

We believe this is right since that's what HDCD.exe does and also fixed reports of clipping.

[Bernhard]

I agree, we do not want any clipping.

If -6 is the solution, then I will have to turn up more.
Definitely better than no HDCD at all, even if I have not more than 26 albums of this kind.

[Hendrik]

You can use Volume Leveling, it's specifically designed to compensate for differences like this, and it was changed to properly adjust for the 6dB gain difference as well.