[MLA] recent loudness information

[Robert Ludwig]

Greetings everyone,

The day after the Grammy Awards the Producers and Engineers wing of The Recording Academy had their annual day-after-the-Grammys Advisory Council meeting at the Biltmore in LA.  

As I am on that Council but I wasn’t in LA I was one of the people on the conference call and unfortunately the phones were down at the Biltmore when the live discussion about Loudness was happening, so I have only today gotten the official notes from the meeting filling me in with the portions I missed.

As the AES has a loudness panel, now Maureen Droney, Emily Lazar and Tom Elmhirst have formed a loudness panel for the P&E Wing.  

After finding out about this I had a phone call with Maureen Droney(whose official title these days is "Managing Director/Producers & Engineers Wing—Recording Technology”)

Apparently Beck (who won again this year for Best Engineered album, his second one) had bitterly complained about the way his album sounded on Spotify.  So the P&E Wing wants to help educate the masses about loudness.

The most interesting thing from my call was Maureen saying the reason we get these mix-engineers submitting these blisteringly hot mixes for mastering is ONLY because the people who create and submit the artist’s DEMOs to the record companies are the root cause of this chain of fools. 

These highly paid and royalty-earning mixers are all in competition with one another, and if the mix they submit to A&R is not at least as loud as the demos A&R were referencing, the A&R dept. won’t accept it and use another mixer that will beat the demo.

I hadn’t really anticipated hearing about this scenario.  So the education needs to go even further back up the chain.

BTW I gave Maureen all of our information including the white papers from our site.  She was especially grateful for Eelco’s paper. 

All my best,

Bob Ludwig

PS:
The P&E Wing Advisory Council agenda contained the following questions from the AES loudness group for the P&E Wing to answer.
========================================
Questions for us from the AES:

o   Do NARAS members have a specific technical opinion about what loudness they should be delivering their content at?
 – or – do they want to achieve whatever the best listening experience is for their listeners? What’s the POV of the recording engineers and their artists?

o   If a player can provide more than adequate gain, do NARAS members feel there is a technical or creative penalty for delivering the average loudness of their recordings at values as soft as -24LKFS? If so, this needs to be addressed ASAP.

o   Are NARAS members familiar with the LKFS/LUFS  measurement technique that is used in the internationally accepted ITU-R BS.1770 standard? This method is the uncontested algorithm that contributed to fixing loudness globally for DTV. It seems all distributed audio is headed in this direction. It’s important we all are working with the same tools. 

o   Does NARAS see a benefit to harmonizing your artist’s content with loudness’ of other streaming content like Internet TV (OTT), Internet Radio, Podcasts and Advertising?
=================================================================================

The AES has a Loudness Committee with the goal of making a Recommendation that could standardize compression/leveling for music services as it did for TV sound. Tidal is using a form of the Recommendation and Spotify has shown interest
 
Streaming         Target loudness     Normalisation    Enabled by       Are quiet songs             Is Limiting Service            
in LUFS (approx.)          type                   default?             turned up?                     used?
                                                           
YouTube           -13                                Track                         Yes                            No                                No

Spotify              -14                                 Both                           Yes                            Yes                               Yes

TIDAL (*)          -14                                 Album                       Yes                            No                                No

Pandora            -14                                Track                        Yes                            Yes                               No

iTunes               -16                                 Both                          No                              Yes                               No

 Spotify now also publishes what it is doing on its Artist Page here:
https://artists.spotify.com/faq/mastering-and loudness#what-is-loudness-normalization-and-why-is-it-used <https://artists.spotify.com/faq/mastering-and%20loudness#what-is-loudness-normalization-and-why-is-it-used>
https://artists.spotify.com/faq/mastering-and-loudness#will-spotify-play-my-track-at-the-level-it%27s-mastered <https://hes32-ctp.trendmicro.com/wis/clicktime/v1/query?url=https%3a%2f%2fartists.spotify.com%2ffaq%2fmastering%2dand%2dloudness%23will%2dspotify%2dplay%2dmy%2dtrack%2dat%2dthe%2dlevel%2dit%2527s%2dmastered&umid=b1658228-8477-4d37-bd69-bbbaffe8e50c&auth=844ce87b8192f356b8dc8ceed1c7d187eeaf8cb2-65ff086a64797faaad61efb59e9fa13cd325260b>
There is also this tool: Loudness penalty tester:    https://www.loudnesspenalty.com <https://www.loudnesspenalty.com/>
And this article from the NY Times :  https://nyti.ms/2DYdW8T?smid=nytcore-ios-share <https://nyti.ms/2DYdW8T?smid=nytcore-ios-share>
 
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