The Loudness Revolution
From the "Wars" to Smart Standards
The “loudness wars” raged wildly during the 90s and 00s. Many productions suffered casualties in headroom and even went so far to employ clipping to get the last drop of loudness. It was a survival tactic. Failing to push the limits meant your song would lack impact and pale in comparison to others in the club or on the radio.
This trend eventually bled into TV and cinema, causing major headaches. Over-the-top ads and trailers pushed the limits of human hearing, often resulting in a forced reduction in volume that destroyed the dynamic range of the main program.
A New Way to Measure
While trailers already had a basic standard to combat this (TASA’s Leq(m) 85 dB), a broader shift occurred in 2010 when the EBU and ITU joined forces to create a more comprehensive loudness standard.
Loudness, however, is a perceptual unit. It depends on how humans actually hear. After extensive testing with listener panels to determine what people actually perceive as “loud”, a new measurement system was born: EBU R1281 and ITU-R BS.17702.
These standards use:
- Weighting Filters: To adjust for the specific frequencies the human ear is most sensitive to.
- Integrated Measurement: To calculate the loudness of an entire song or program from start to finish.
- LUFS: The resulting “Integrated Loudness” is expressed in LU or LUFS (Loudness Units relative to Full Scale).
Today, these standards are widely adopted. TV typically targets -23 LUFS, while cinema and streamers like Netflix use a target of -27 LUFS with sophisticated dialogue gating algorithms. Even YouTube and Spotify have adapted their own LUFS-based targets.
Mastering the Mix with PlayerSpecz
Because loudness measurement is now an integral part of professional audio production, you need the right tools to stay compliant.
PlayerSpecz offers a comprehensive suite of tools to give you insight and help you dial in your sound:
- Integrated & Visual History: Calculate your total integrated loudness while viewing a zoomable graph of your momentary and short-term loudness history. This helps you see exactly where you are pushing the limit and which passages are softer.
- Dynamic Range (LRA): Measure your Loudness Range to get a clear indication of how dynamic your material actually is.
- True Peak Monitoring: Modern delivery specs often limit peak levels to prevent the clipping tricks of the 90s. PlayerSpecz measures “True Peak” value, using oversampling to find inter-sample peaks that might occur when the signal is reconstructed at the DAC (digital output) stage.
- Loudness Distribution: This unique tool acts like an audio histogram, familiar to photographers and visual designers, giving you a deep look at how you are utilizing your available dynamics.
PlayerSpecz is a professional waveform audio player and is completely free to use. While the advanced loudness features require the Pro version, you can explore them yourself with a fully functioning 2-week demo.
Give it a spin at www.lobith-audio.com!