Very good description of normalization, except for one statement:

What normalisation gives you is headroom - the ability to hear soft sounds above the noise floor of your system.

In my experience, normalizing rarely makes the soft sounds much louder. The only thing that will get those soft sounds louder is dynamic range compression, which is a different animal than Normalization.

Unless the original waveform only reached 70% or something, but as I said before, the vast majority of CDs are already normalized.


___________
Tony Fabris