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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.'"
You mean, by making choice between Company A, Station 1 and Company A, Station 2?
Man, are naive, idiot or just a kid?
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Sorry I ran out of breath to laugh any longer.
I have a decibel meter app on my phone and I've seen levels go from the middle 50s during the program to the upper 60s during the ads.
The app isn't probably that accurate but that is a really big jump, enough to cause me pain sometimes. There is one ad from a local lawyer that jumps up to 70 at one point.
Guess who I won't be calling for legal services.
The industry has listened to and ignored citizen complaints for 50 years. What makes you think they will change now?
Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro
This is the perfect example of what is wrong with the US system. This does not belong as a law. There is no harm to people. It tramples on free speech.
But someone found it annoying. And now we have another law. More costs. Less freedom. And no real gain.
The public's airwaves, the public's rules.
Don't like it? Don't use public resources to distribute your speech.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
And no real gain.
Less gain is the whole point.
The law was passed because too many audio sources had excessive gain.
"By the end of 2012, broadcast televisionâ¦"
Broadcast what?
Oh, I think I've heard of this. It's like YouTube if you could only choose one of 6 videos to watch, someone else decided when to hit "play" and they made you watch 3 minutes of ads for every 7 minutes of video.
more a matter of "no regulation". just a medium with a defined peak and no consequences in hardware for driving the average too high.
vinyl had physical limits that would make the music sound like shit if they were exceeded, and in extreme cases would cause the disc to be unplayable. CDs don't have that problem. they can be 16khz, fullscale, 100% of the time and pass verification, but will pass the hardware problems down the line (to your tweeters in this case - they'll burn even if the speaker is running well below it's rated max power).
things were made worse considering people in the pop music target audience would often brag about blowing their speakers up...
I'm a broadcast tech at a license-funded TV station in Norway, so we don't have to deal with advertising volume jumps, but in general, we aim to follow the already-established EBU recommendation 128, which specifies loudness.
Indeed, the spec is publically available: http://tech.ebu.ch/docs/r/r128.pdf
toresbe
If you had read the article or the title, or summary, you'd have read that the article is about the volume of commercials, not the content or material being sold.
If you want to turn this into a free speech issue, you have the right to speak about whatever you want, but you don't have the right to grab someone by the ear and then scream into it.
My kingdom for a donkey!
dB needs no baseline. from mid 50s to upper 60s is 12 dB (just to assign a number to it). That difference is 8x as loud. Absent any other information, it's not unreasonable to assume that to be correct, and there's no need to know what the TV was set at, the 8x difference would likely remain the same, unless it was reaching the mechanical limits of the system on either end.
Learn to love Alaska
It's not about debt or anything that complicated. Just restoring regulations THAT WE HAD YEARS AGO would help immensely. Same story as with banking. Those regulated pushed to do away with the regulations and then really bad things happened. It's all about greed.
A fair amount of freedom in running businesses and healthy competition is usually good. But the changes made in broadcast ownership REDUCED competition. And if investment bankers want to be involved in high risk investments it should be only with fund owned by those willing to take the risks, not with taxpayer insured depositors money from traditional savings/checking banking.
Broadcasters traditionally have an important role to serve the public interest. If we did away with PAID radio/tv political ads, using only fairly doled out community service time, there'd be far less money inviting corruption in campaigns. Obviously limiting fund-raising has failed. But doing away with a major part of the spending would really help.
Has anyone noticed that Christmas season ads start at Thanksgiving or even Halloween, and they didn't years ago? Blame the FCC rule change on ads. Stations used to voluntarily pick a limit on how many minutes an hour of ads they run, and could exceed that two weeks a year. So ads would go nuts before Christmas (and elections when held). Now that insanely heavy level of ads has become the norm.
Gain is a meaningless term in the context you're using it
Not in the chosen context: a humorous bad pun.
But if you want to be a stereotypical humorless pedantic nerd, I also happen to be an electrical engineer. I'll define the reference as the output level of the musicians' microphones. The overall signal gain of the music industry system between the musicians' microphones and the consumers' DACs has been set too high.
Awesome post... but I have a nitpick, sorry::
For one, human hearing is more sensitive at specific frequencies
yes, this is absolutely true
(e.g. speech and crying babies, and probably any resonant frequencies of our skull).
no, I don't think any of these are examples.
Human speech ranges from 300 Hz to as high as 3.4 kHz, but most commonly and generally hover between 800 Hz and 1200 Hz. Humans don't perceive 1kHz as being louder, but 4kHz always sounds louder and sounds at this frequency tend to cause the listener ear fatigue.
A baby's cry is closer to that 4kHz loudly percieved and tiring frequency, but at around 3.4 kHz at its highest, it's below it enough that I'm nearly certain that's not the reason a baby's cry sounds louder. I believe the reason we hear a baby's cry as louder has more to do with the evolution of the hypothalamus and less to do with the actual frequency of a normal baby's cry. If we pitch shift the frequency of a baby's cry, or even reduce the sound pressure, it still stands out against a background of random noise, such as sounds of lots of people talking or a cacophony of wild animal sounds, because we have evolved to recognize the timbre of this sound, which is more distinct than its natural frequency range. The hypothalmus allows us to filter perceptions... but filtering out a baby's cry is universally accepted as being nearly impossible (I'm sure it can be done, but the mere fact that most find it unsettling or irritating and before long will seak to quell it speaks volumes).
The human skull has been shown to resonate at frequencies between 500Hz and 7.5kHz... so that's pretty much where we hear everything... we certainly hear below 500Hz and above 7.5kHz, but that's such a huge chunk of our normal hearing spectrum that it's unlikely there is any particular frequency we hear louder because of skull resonance.
Regardless of this, again, nice post.
The Admin and the Engineer
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.
TODO: Something witty here...
This exact same line of reasoning has been used to support the notion that there are certain words you can never say on television.
The FCC exists because 100+ years ago, assclowns with radios were making false distress calls, cursing at people on the airwaves, and faking naval messages.
In 1912, power to regulate the airwaves was given to the United States Secretary of Commerce and Labor
In 1927 it was handed over to the newly created Federal Radio Commission and
in 1934 it was handed over to the newly created Federal Communications Commission
/Early regulation of the airwaves is a textbook example of regulatory capture.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
A section of historic FCC rules for radio is here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=Sbw8AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA150&lpg=PA150&dq=steps+shall+be+taken+to+preserve+dynamic+characteristics+of+music&source=bl&ots=B2uXF56uEj&sig=K4gC8p4b1LaXyTTt6VsgnNFpdO4&hl=en
The phrase "However, precautions shall be taken so as not to substantially alter the dynamic characteristics of musical programs" was removed after being in the rules only a short time. Many broadcasters protested, wanting to use very aggressive audio processing. Sometime it was to sound loud than the competition (doesn't work when everyone does it), sometimes it was to help hide the noises present with a marginal signal.
There were past loudness rules for ads. Here are the full details of what's being proposed for DTV now. DTV audio has generally been better and more dynamic. However when programs are dynamic, the average loudness is lower, making commercials stand out even more.
https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2011/06/03/2011-13822/implementation-of-the-commercial-advertisement-loudness-mitigation-calm-act
Has anyone noticed that Christmas season ads start at Thanksgiving or even Halloween, and they didn't years ago?
Mostly I've been noticing people saying that. Every year. For the 20+ years i"ve been paying attention.
Maybe 30 or 35 years past it was that way - and it would be great if it were that way again - but that wasnow literally more than a generation ago.
> And no real gain.
Except pre-recorded music that doesn't sound like shit on quality stereo gear.
This is actually an example of *good* legislation. The whole reason the "loudness war" happened in the first place was pressure from upper management on recording engineers (who, by and large, knew why doing it was bad, and who were mostly forced to go along with it if they wanted to remain employed) to make their next CD a little louder than everybody else's, until we got to the point where a 2004 pop CD was quantized to levels once exclusively the realm of a Telarc *DIGITAL CANON* in a recording of 1812 Overture whose main purpose was to show off your kilowatt-RMS amp and array of subwoofers. What the government did in this case was let the engineers off the hook. When management asks them to "pump up the volume", they can say, "Sure, I can do that. But no radio station in the country will play it, and all the money we're spending to promote the artist will be for naught. Do you still want me to do it, or would you like me to master a recording that sounds good and that radio stations will be able to play?"
I want immersive, clipping-free digital audio back like we had when I was in college. If it literally takes an act of Congress to ensure that 95% of the audio on a 16-bit CD quantizes to an absolute value of 0x3FFF or less, so be it. Now get off my lawn, or I'll have to remind your parents what digital canons sound like when you have a kilowatt (RMS) amp and a pair of 18-inch JL Audio subs in the trunk...
People need to remember that one of the reasons the "loudness wars" started in the first place was producer/label/artist A wanted his song/album to sound "louder" than producer/label/artist B. The question is, why?
A very simple answer: "louder" is almost always perceived as better. It's about standing out above the rest.
Take for example - given a set of 20 songs played in a club, all at roughly the same "loudness". Along comes one track which is "louder" than the rest. Chances are very high that more people in the club will take notice of this track. We're predispositioned to perceiving anomalies in our everyday lives, so something that is out of the ordinary (e.g. the louder track in this example) grabs our attention more than the other tracks. And at that point, the crowd would go "man, that track is really pumping".
The other issue is that the mastering engineer (who makes these kinds of calls about how "loud" or "hot" a track is before getting burnt to the master) is being paid to do something according to his client's needs. So if the producer wants the track louder, and is the one footing the bill, then there's not much the mastering engineer can do. So if the paymaster wants a loud track, that's what he will get. If mastering engineer A sticks to his guns, the producer's just going to go to another mastering house, which will mean revenue lost.
Another way to put it - if the customer wants to buy Windows NT and is dead set on this, no amount of enlightening by the consultant about the benefits of a Unix-based platform is going to change what the customer wants.
So yeah, these two factors combine and the result: the loudness wars.
The Wknd Sessions - Malaysian and South East Asia independent music
There's an old quote from the late 1800s where someone grumbled that Christmas seemed to start earlier every year - so early, they said, that barely has december started than Christmas takes over. Christmas today starts at the beginning of October, when the first advertising starts. So that's an advancement of two months per century. Extrapolating wildly, that means by the year 2500 Christmas will be in effect continually.
Such a tool was actually ruled illegal in the US, prior to 2005. Then congress passed a law, the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act, to overturn the court decision and thus make 'parential controls' legal, under pressure from the pro-family crowd and a sympathetic group of republicans. Including Hatch.
But, being a Hatch bill, it also increased the penalty for noncommercial copyright infringement with a three year jail sentence if the work infringed was not yet published for public distribution. Ten years for repeat infringement... and that in addition to all of the already-existing civil and criminal penalties.
Just a little harsher, and they can start on the executions.
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.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Not really the fault of the medium. It is much easier to avoid hitting the limits by accident on the CD.
If you leave, say, 20 dB of headroom for really loud peaks, you still have a signal to noise ratio better than 70 dB. That is more than the entire dynamic range for vinyl.
The problem is (again) with the loudness wars. If you don't leave headroom, but master a CDs as loud as possible, you get indeed more nasty clipping than with analog equipment. Producers and sound engineers abusing the CD give it a bad name
C - the footgun of programming languages