[MLA] Normalizing on Tidal

[Grimm | Eelco]

Dear friends,

I have some good news to share.

For a Dutch TV program with millions of viewers, me and a collegue and students from HKU University of the Arts Utrecht are investigating the sound quality and normalizing quality of all the streaming services available in The Netherlands. This will be presented at prime time some day in March. 

Some results so far:
- Spotify seems to be on average at -12 LUFS, not at -11 LUFS as we thought. And it applies limiting to softer tracks. 
- Tidal Hifi often is bit transparant, but sometimes artefacts of sample rate conversion and/or watermarking can be heard.

This of course means that Tidal does not perform loudness normalization. Playlists are a hell to listen to. 

However!

In https://community.roonlabs.com/t/tidal-and-volume-leveling/1137/7 I read:
"TIDAL started sending replaygain values to us recently. Our current alpha build has Roon consuming them. I'm expecting to release that to everyone early next week." 
(a posting of 25 days ago).

That is _fantastic_ news! It could not be better in fact. Hopefully all other services will follow in this choice. It means that with Tidal it is a breeze to implement Norm-L!

I am in pretty close contact with Spotify at the moment. I will 'kindly but strongly' suggest that they follow Tidal in this approach. Can we reach out to other services as well?

All the best,
Eelco