[MLA] Tidal

[Grimm | Eelco]

Dear friends,

I just returned from Oslo. My presentation was very well attended: I estimate app. 40 people, which was a large part of the personnel of the Oslo facility.

My contact told me that Album Normalisation is already implemented and active since this week. If you turn on loudness normalisation in the iOS app, it is album normalisation. Before the end of the month it will be turned on by default. The only question for them still is how to deal with it for the current users. New users and new installs will definitely find it turned on by default. But internal discussion is still going about whether they can turn it on after the next update for everyone without any notice or not. And if they would add a notice, whether too many people would become confused. They want to avoid triggering abusive campaigns in fora at all cost. The fact that Spotify has normalisation turned on by default makes it very defendable, but the Tidal user experience will still change abruptly. Mark that Spotify did it in two steps: first to -11 LUFS (from the average -8 LUFS of most masters). And then to -14 LUFS. So two steps of just 3 dB that are hard to notice for the average user. By going to -14 LUFS in one step, Tidal will confront their users with a 6 dB step on average, which is very noticable. It's an interesting problem...

BTW, I learned that album normalisation with the average level in stead of aligning the loudest tracks would have been a no go for Tidal. It would ask for a complete re-measure of all audio in the database since you cannot just average the track loudnesses to find the Integrated album loudness (because of the relative gate in BS1770)...

All the best,
Eelco


>> On 7 Oct 2017, at 19:18, Eelco Grimm <eelco at grimmaudio.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Don't worry Thomas. Afaik their album normalization software is already implemented quite far. Also, Tidal told me in June they had not turned on normalization by default yet because they would only do so if it was album normalization. That's why they were very happy with my research. And why chances are higher now that it will happen soon.
>> 
>> NB I am now also in contact with Qobuz...
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Eelco
>> 
>>> Op 7 okt. 2017 om 16:20 heeft Thomas Lund <thomas at lund.one> het volgende geschreven:
>>> 
>>> Hi Eelco,
>>> 
>>> Please don’t promote delaying loudness normalization any further because of album norm or other new ideas. More than a year has passed where Tidal have been delaying normalization system-wide - which you promised wouldn’t be the consequence of getting introduced.
>>> 
>>> cheers,
>>> Thomas
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On 6 Oct 2017, at 21.34, Grimm | Eelco <eelco at grimmaudio.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Dear friends,
>>>> 
>>>> Next week on Friday I will fly to Oslo and present my 'album normalization' research to the Tidal team. I will also have a meeting with the Tidal CTO... Looking forward to that trip!
>>>> 
>>>> All the best,
>>>> Eelco
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