Does this app "normalize" the output?

[gosa]

Hi All!

Thought I'd ask you guys about something I noticed yesterday when I was playing some music while doing some "kitchen duty" at home...

I connected my external speakers (Nokia MD-4) and went ahead to create a nice eq/tone setup for this. (Used the default bass+treble).

After a while (it was probably there all the time) I noticed that the strength of the output varied with the characteristics of the music.

The strong parts of a song got "pulled down" while the lower parts of the same song seemed to play as intended. This makes me think of some kind of a "auto gain" control that kicks in and tries to keep a good level all the time. The result was that the music was shifting up/down (in strength) making it a horrible experience.

Is this something anyone else has noticed? I never noticed anything similar before using the radio or meridian together with these speakers, so I'm leaning more towards software than the hardware being the problem.

Did I miss some kind of setting in the program that controls this?

BTW - I'm on a HTC Desire with 2.2 and the latest OTA (don't know the version number)

[admin]

There is no normalization/compression or limiter currently in PowerAMP (though I'm planning to add limiter for EQ in some next major update).

Thus you can get as much frequency amplification from PowerAMP EQ as hardware (16bit DAC) allows.

May be it's something in Desire's hardware?

[Trey]

More than likely, the nokia speakers have a cheapo limter to protect themselves from overload. Or like the dev said, it could be that the desire has a hardware limiter.

[FiberG]

Firstly: Thanks for a fantastic app!!

Instead of implementing some kind of limiter function, why not read and use the embedded ReplayGain/MP3Gain-tags from the FLAC/MP3-files?

Best regards

[peterabelard]

I don't know if that's the case, but such effects occur when you set bass and treble to a very high level, while keeping the mids low. Try setting a more balanced EQ.