DAW mastering features

I was just reading "The Mastering Engineer's Handbook" written by Bobby Owsinski, and published by Mix Magazine. It even has our own Bob Olhsson as one of tghe few commentators.

Anyway, I was skimming through the section on normalizing. Of course, everyone cautions against it, and gave good reasons why it is not used professionally. But I was wondering, these guys use DAWs like Sonic Solutions and Pro Tools. Now, I have never used either of these, but wondered if these programs are as up to date as I think they aren't. PC programs like Sound Forge, Audition/Cool Edit Pro and Waves all have advanced features that allow one to do accurate RMS normalization at high bit depths, higher than 24-bit. Do the ones for the Mac platform commonly used in the studios have these extra capabilities that would render these warnings somewhat outdated? Bob Olhsson? Jamie? Angel? Anyone care to comment?

 

You want to apply the least amount of math possible to the signal. The only instance where a higher level buys better resolution is when the signal is first digitized. After the fact level adjustments will always reduce resolution. (This is just as true in the analog world, by the way.) Sometimes it's needed and the net subjective effect is worth accepting the loss but the number of level changes applied to a signal should always be minimized. Digital audio can potentially be cloned but there is no inherent theoretical advantage to digital signal processing. I like to call this the notion of digital free lunch. The moment you start crunching numbers rather than just copying them, all bets are off when it comes to quality.

Sonic and ProTools are both capable of 48 bit and 64 bit float calculations and Pro Tools finally has included proper dithering as a default. Both are also very easy to misuse and it happens too frequently.