[MLA] Loudness War in New York Times

[Kevin Gross]

That's an encouraging story, Eelco.

Sounds like we're getting significantly different outcomes in different
areas of audio.

I guess it was naive to hope that normalization would fix everything
because radio has been normalized all along and yet, here we are.

Kevin Gross - AVA Networks


On Sun, Feb 10, 2019 at 3:09 PM Grimm | Eelco <eelco at grimmaudio.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I received a message from Wessel Oltheten about his mastering loudness
> level. I have put it in Google Translate to give you an impression of this
> positive story:
>
> "I have now delivered everything at -14 a -13LUFS in the past three years,
> and some acoustic albums even softer. And I mean everything. For the past
> three years I send the following 'disclaimer' along with every file that
> goes out the door:
>
> > Finally, a little information about loudness: the masters are aligned to
> the loudness that streaming services like Spotify, YouTube and Tidal use.
> This means that the masters are hardly restricted in terms of dynamics -
> good news for the music! But the files may appear softer compared to other
> materials. This is not the way the consumer will hear it; if you want to
> get a real picture you can best compare the masters in iTunes with other
> tracks: if you enable the 'sound check' option in the preferences, iTunes
> plays your entire library on the same loudness, similar to the way
> streaming services and broadcasters normalize loudness.
>
> In those three years I have sometimes had to give some extra explanation,
> but there is no one, but no one at all, who asked me for a louder master!
> Last year I worked on 600 songs for more than 100 different customers, so I
> think that's a nice sample. I even notice that people (including musicians)
> are already familiar with the information about standardization. They then
> trust that I know what number it should be, and just listen to the sound.
> In my world of relatively small artists it is therefore nice and grateful
> to be allowed to work, and 'persevering' does not cost any effort. That is
> beautiful thanks to PLOUD, Spotify and YouTube!
>
> PS I did tell one big dance label at the time that I do not want to work
> for them anymore because they only kept asking for a ridiculous rms-number
> after my explanation. In this case, the artist and producer had even asked
> me if I could go back a step further in loudness with respect to my first
> master (!), But there was a disagreement with the label that kept insisting
> on making it loud. Ah, I do not miss such customers and I'm busier than
> ever.”
>
> Now, that is what I mean an encouraging story… Loudness normalizing does
> help.
>
> All the best,
> Eelco
>
>
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