  We present a method to maintain the subjective perception of volume of audio
signals and, at the same time, reduce their absolute peak value. We focus on
achieving this without compromising the perceived audio quality. This is
specially useful, for example, to maximize the perceived reproduction level of
loudspeakers where simply amplifying the signal amplitude, and hence their peak
value, is limited due to already constrained physical designs. In particular,
we minimize the absolute peak value subject to a constraint based on auditory
masking. This limits the perceptual difference between the original and the
modified signals. Moreover, this constraint can be tuned and allows to control
the resulting audio quality. We show results comparing loudness and audio
quality as a function of peak reduction. These results suggest that our method
presents the best trade-off between loudness and audio quality when compared
against classical methods based on compression and clipping.
