[MLA] More good news (Spotify)

[Grimm | Eelco]

Hi Ian,

> I think we need to take this issue seriously. I’ve seen a lot of people accepting the idea that normalisation is a win-win, but I also get a lot of kick-back from artists and engineers about loudness management - these are people who have invested in the idea that “loud is good”, and don’t want to believe the alternative, regardless of objective facts - rather like people with entrenched political beliefs. 

Why don't you teach them how to make a loud master at -14 LUFS? Of course the loudness war will not really be over - it would be a silly idea to think that humans will ever change. We just changed the rules. See it as an old game that everyone is bored of after 20 years and by changing the rules, the game becomes interesting again. One has to find the new mazes in the net and trick the technical limits like before - just differently. This will bring a new and interesting competition.

So I would guess the new loud will be very dynamic, with slightly more energy below 2 kHz than above it, and lots of low end below 50 Hz. This will probably sound much better than the totally squashed sausages of the past 20 years...

So please encourage them to make the new LOUD ! Maybe the best strategy is to find one of the worst offenders when it comes to smashing audio and challenge him to make a louder master than you can for the new Spotify target level. A loudness contest for the new world! 

This can become quite important to do because like we all know, the old sausages will sound soft after normalization. By starting this loudness contest we may be able to smother the soft sausage discussion before it becomes annoying. 

One other strategic position we should consider is FM radio. It is still quite important for artists. So we have to proof that a track that is mastered loud for -14 LUFS will also sound louder on the radio than a traditional sausage. This should be easy to do, since the sausages generally sound softer after radio processing than more dynamic tracks. But we should definitely proof it. So perhaps we should build two targets into the loudness contest: the jury judges the subjective loudness of the track at -14 LUFS _and_ after a standard Optimod process (= like on air). Bob Orban will likely offer his help, but I also have very good contacts at Omnia if needed, or at the Dutch public pop music station (that has so much compression that a telephone line at -30 dB sounds equally loud as a -4 LUFS CD track...).

Cheers,
Eelco