[MLA] Congratulations Ian

[Bob Katz]

Just read your blog of today:  "You tube reveals...."

This is a genuine revelation and a breakthrough. And the accompanying blog from 9/27  "How loud.... " points out in different words what I've been preaching about the k-system of monitor calibration. What I find by using a constant monitor gain is that my dynamic masters with, say -16 lufs integrated level sound as loud as (and often clearer than) -14 lufs more compressed masters. That's because (as you point out) the loudest passages of both productions have been made the same by my mastering to the ear. I know that Florian has told me mezzo forte works for him. But not for me or you in music mastering. In music mastering for me, Forte (not double forte) defines the center of gravity best. 

I've always preached to master the forte first and that's why I pushed for album norm to follow the loudest track. 

Your two blogs are great stuff. I've never ever studied the measured short term loudness as you have (bravo, Ian) but it goes along with my forte principle so it makes sense. 

And in fact, by purposely avoiding telling the reader you tube's integrated loudness target and stressing matching the short term loudness (the forte) instead youve done a great service to meter reading engineers around the globe who have not yet calibrated their monitor controls and are looking for a number. Excellent work, Ian. More discussions to come. 

Best


Bob

My iPhone made me write this. Quotes only below this line. Nothing more to see here. 
----------------------------------------------------

> On Sep 21, 2017, at 4:19 PM, Grimm | Eelco <eelco at grimmaudio.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear MLA friends,
> 
> Like Bob Ludwig has brought up more than once, the UMG Watermarking of files by Universal is an even worse problem than low bit rate codecs. According to my old Tidal contact, Universal had stopped adding the mark to new masters. I asked confirmation from my Spotify contact and he wrote:
> 
>> What we've heard is that they still use it, but they've improved it a lot so it's almost inaudible ... that's supposed to have happened ca 2014/2015. So we've tried to push them to redeliver their entire back catalog with the new watermarking, but so far they've been completely unyielding - and they also say they haven't changed the watermarking either :/
> 
> This is new to me. Does anyone have more information about this?
> I asked him for a hint about who to pressure. And he wrote:
> 
>> No idea who to pressure - I would imagine contacting tech sites like The Verge could be effective. Did I send the link to the blog posts one of our employees has made? https://www.mattmontag.com/page/3
>> That could perhaps be used to point newspapers to the problem. He started writing about it before joining Spotify, but has followed up (still on his private blog) a couple of times. Just make sure not to mention you've been in contact with us officially ... we certainly don't want it to be seen as us putting pressure on them, even if that's what we want to do :)
> 
> Is there anything we can do?
> 
> Cheers,
> Eelco
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