[MLA] Interesting info about Spotify normalization

[Ian Shepherd]

> The other thing that may be related, or not, is that we know many streaming services are doing some sort of limiting

Actually only Spotify is applying limiting at the moment, to the best of my knowledge.

> It might be good to put together some technical recommendations to avoid nasty limiter implementation and tuning. If it's gonna happen, and it's happening, it might as well be done right

Personally I think we should only discourage it from happening, but fwiw one of the AES groups has already created a freely available limiter for the purpose of achieving certain loudness targets (eg. -16 LUFS from a -23 LUFS source) I believe. I haven’t tried it out, though.

My point being, the horse may already have bolted in this case. I certainly agree that MLA could make a very positive future contribution by describing the best way noisy environments can be handled in portable players, though.

Personally I’ve found that top-down limiting has NO benefit in noisy environments, in fact it has a detrimental effect - the “blunting” of transients and removal of detail makes things less intelligible, not more.

Ian