Need Recommendations on Audio Level limits

I'm working with Vegas Movie Studio 6 and DVDA Studio 3. I'm very weak on the audio aspects of VMS and hope that you kind folks can steer me in the right direction.

I'm looking for advice on the best way to get my final DVD product to have sound levels similar to what I experience on commercial DVDs.

Example: I'm working on a video shot at a friend's birthday party that took place in a noisy restaurant. My first attempt at burning the DVD required that I turn down my Yamaha amplifier to a -40 dB volume. Normally, I have commercial discs play at -30 to -25 dB.

I've seen comments here about using normalize in the switches section. I highlighted the entire audio track and set the limit to -5 dB and then hit normalize. The next disc was better, but still on the loud side. Short of experimenting on some DVD-RW's, can anyone give me some advice on what they use as a limiter on the recorded audio? What do you use as the limiting dB value? I don't want to send this disc to our friend and have it blow her out of her chair on start up!

Thanks!