[MLA] Loudness War in New York Times

[Grimm | Eelco]

Hi Kevin,

> I was surprised to learn from Bob Ludwig's quotes that loudness normalization has not been successful at stemming the loudness war. Are others here in agreement with this assessment?

The loudness war is caused by fear. Fear is always larger when larger amounts of money and/or ego are involved. I can imagine that the type of customers that Bob Ludwig has live very much in fear. 

I know the Indie scene in The Netherlands a bit. Since a couple of years the better engineers are all aware of the normalization by Spotify and now work to -14 LUFS, -12 LUFS max whenever they can. This was not the case before Spotify used normalization. At the time -8 LUFS was the standard and it was very hard to convince clients to go lower.

Normalization does work. But you should not think it will convince everyone. There’s also still squashed commercials made in Europe, although the more dynamic ones sound louder with R128. 

Cheers,
Eelco