Nonetheless, tape has hiss, modulation noise, distortion, and all the other drawbacks that made people want digital in the first place. There must be a better way. Why Normalization Alone Isn't Enough Normalization is a fairly standard digital signal processing technique that scans through the program material for the highest level, and if that level doesn't reach the maximum available dynamic range, the program boosts the overall signal so that the peak hits the highest level possible. For example, suppose you record a track of music and the highest peak registers at 6 dB below the maximum available headroom. 1 dB of maximum headroom.
Normalization has nothing to do with a song's average level, only the peak level.
Yet when balancing levels between tracks in the process of assembling a master tape, it is the average level that is usually most important. This is one reason why most mastering engineers recommend that you not normalize each individual song. Despite these cautions, in many cases normalization can indeed help put the highest possible peak level on tape. But this won't help very much if the average level of a track is relatively low, yet there are one or two major peaks that hit the maximum available dynamic range. The Super Normalize function simply ignores some of the highest peaks, and clips them.