Quiet Victories Won In the Loudness Wars

Stowie101 writes with a few pieces from an article on what's been happening in the fight against over-compressed radio music and deafening tv commercials: "The first major step towards the elimination of heavily-compressed music could be the International Telecommunications Union's ... measurement of loudness that was ... revised in 2011. ... Acting to rectify the problem on the broadcast side of the issue, many European and Asian broadcasters are adopting loudness standards that are based on the criteria first introduced by the ITU. Here in the U.S., the federal government has also been proactive to improve the quality of broadcast television. By the end of 2012, the broadcast community will have to follow the CALM Act that requires commercials to be played at the same volume as broadcast television. In terms of music and recording, these broadcast standards do not apply. But Shepherd theorizes the measurement standards will be applied to the production of music. 'Measuring loudness, in general, isn't easy. Now the ITU has agreed on a new "loudness unit:" the LU. You can measure short- and longer-term loudness over a whole song. They've also agreed on guidelines for broadcast; what the average loudness should be and how much you can vary it. The recommendation has been made law in the U.S. for advertisements and is also being adopted in the U.K. and all over the world. All the major broadcasters here — Sky, the BBC, ITV — have agreed to follow the standard.'"

Comments

Re:too much regulation!

[Tyler Eaves]

Untrue. Vinyl imposes lots of additional limitations, and is much more complicated than a binary "too loud" "not too loud". The louder you cut a record, the wider the groove is. The wider the groove is, the fewer grooves you can physically fit on the record, and thus the less music you can fit per side. If you cut an LP as hot as a typical modern CD (And I'm not even talking a LOUD modern CD, just an average one), you could only fit 12-14 minutes per side. A hot track, and that number will be more like 10 minutes. Whereas with the (sane) mastering common 40 years ago, 20-21 minutes per side was typical, although there were some compromises there too...optimal quality peaks at about 17 minutes per side or so. A recording without a lot of dynamic range, with the loudness turned down a bit (like a live album), and 25 minutes per side isn't at all unreasonable.

Re:too much regulation!

[Cryacin]

We ran a TV ad for our company 12 years ago. Instead of screaming at our customers, we went the exact opposite way, and had dead silence for 30 seconds, with a bit of simple text on the screen. It was amazing the reaction we got. I guess on TV, silence is deafening.