My track sounds less punchy when I export it as a wav than when I play it in Reason

[cielomobile]

Hey all, I've noticed that with this dubstep track I'm working on, when I export it as an audio file to WAV it sounds far less punchy than when I just play it inside Reason. It also seems compressed, i.e. it loses much of its dynamic range, but not in a good way! I haven't noticed this happening before, but this is only my second full track.

One thing that occurs to me is that when I listen to it in Reason, I have the master volume down so it's not too loud on my monitors (I plug my monitors straight into my sound card; there is no mixer in between), but in order to get the level loud enough I put the master fader all the way up, so maybe that is compressing the sound (because the levels on the mixer go all the way to the max)?

Any ideas what is going on? Help would be greatly appreciated!

[Haze]

Try putting a limiter on your master fader and playing with the setting until you find something good. This should add some volume and also keep your master from clipping. If you are mixing with your master fader down and then turning it up when you bounce out a wav there could be clipping that your not hearing when your mixing, so its gonna sound different when you bounce it out. A limiter on the master fader should take care of this.

Not sure but that could be the problem. Hope that helps

[janzak]

Yeah dude I made this mistake a few times back in the day, sounds like you need to adjust your levels a bit, a limiter on the master bus should do the trick

[n2hf1st]

Agreed that you're probably clipping, use a limiter to check the level, if it goes into the red pull the volume down enough so the limiter stops engaging