Consumers everywhere are complaining that when the ads breaks arrive, when they change channels or when the next programme comes on, they have to jump for their remote controls. What’s up?
Time to learn what the new R-128 loudness recommendation means to audio pros around the world…
Is the most worn out part of your home theatre remote the volume control? Or even worse, the mute button?
You, your wife and your kids already know all about loudness. Ask anyone. At a push we’ll deal with bad picture – but we won’t put up with bad sound. The good news is: things are changing!
This article aims to unpack what’s been happening across the world to address the problem of loudness, and the exciting news is that here in Africa broadcasters and production houses are busy planning what to do about it.
If you’ve been trying to cope with automatic level control, hyper-compressed ads, a complaining public, moving technical targets, or just sore ears, read on.
In the good old analogue days we relied on quasi peak programme meters (PPM’s). We didn’t want to overload transmitters or carrier capacities, so to allow enough headroom to cope with fast transients and peaks these meters couldn’t reliably display, broadcasters universally adopted a “permitted maximum PPM level’ (PML) that all content providers needed to adhere to – usually around -9dBFS.
In the race to stand out from the crowd, music producers and advertisers have continuously leveraged compression and limiting technologies to push for ever louder content that still falls under (ok, maybe just over) this permitted maximum level. The side effect of this loudness war is that dynamic range of modern material has been reduced dramatically, meaning there is less and less headroom in any modern mix to allow depth and dynamics to survive the squashing process that makes it all louder. And then louder still.
A new paradigm arrives …
Moving from a level limiting paradigm to an average loudness management paradigm is arguably one of the most fundamental and significant changes the world of audio production and distribution has ever seen!
Want more on BS.1770 and R-128?
In future issues of the Asikhule Update we will expand on these technical recommendations.
Meantime check out http://tech.ebu.ch/docs/testmaterial/ibc09_10things_loudness.pdf
Publics grew irate, and while most markets seemed unable to self-regulate, governments eventually stepped in to legislate (take a look at the CALM Act of the USA) to stop the aural assault.
Within the first decade of the new millennium, industry realised it had all gone too far, and along came a new standard that set out to define what loudness is, how we’d reliably measure it, and what average programme loudness level and real peaks have been met.
This is not possible for a live feed, but is easily doable for any file based submission a broadcaster, aggregator or distributor might receive.
It’s also very doable in music or post production.
One exciting consequence of this new paradigm is that now, as audio people, your mixing has to change.
The ITU recommendation is BS.
1770 was born in2006 defining an algorithm to measure audio programme loudness and true peak level, and and today we have EBU recommendation R-128, based on BS.
1770, which defines a target loudness unit level of “-23LUFS’ (+/- 1LU) for average programme level, along with a true peak target of -1dBFS (TP) and some guidelines for an average loudness range (LRA) of audio content.
What is more – globally the industry has agreed on this approach! So programme loudness is the long-term, integrated loudness over the duration of the programme, or to put it another way – what is the average loudness of the programme over its full duration.
“Programme’ of course can mean a movie, a commercial, a station interstitial or any other self-contained audio element.
It’s important to understand that to determine an average over the full length of the programme implies that you can measure the loudness level, the loudness range and true peaks for the full duration of the programme before assessing whether the R-128 targets of dynamic range to play with – at least 20dB in fact! Compare this to the severely choked 3-5 dB we currently fight the war within, and you begin to appreciate that a whole new language of audio might be possible .
Three dimensions to address: people, process and technology Having the industry agree on a new standard is actually pretty significant.
Given the history of divergent picture and sound standards around the planet, and given the competitive vested interests of global and regional tech vendors, not many would have put money on the world agreeing on a new way to measure and manage loudness, never mind implementing it using open-standards based metering and measurement tools.
Bigger challenges exist, however, in getting this new audio leveling paradigm working corre
ctly in the context of your existing technical infrastructure and manpower.
Many questions will need to be addressed as we move towards our digital tomorrow – questions such as: how to teach everyone in the media concept-to-consumption chain about the new requirements and processes; how to make these work with existing production, ingest, storage, management and transmission processes and technology infrastructure; how to cope with unpredictable levels from live and other real- time third party feeds; how to deal with legacy and archive material; how to get production houses, large and small, to a point where their sound people properly produce to R-128 and use the new dynamic range that’s permissible, and exactly where in the chain should we monitor conformance and quality and fix any anomalies we find? Processes need to be developed and carefully managed while we make the transition to this new loudness paradigm.
Producers and broadcasters are all realising that to do this properly will require extensive communication, education and skills development. What we really need as an industry is a summit on loudness! Take a look below at what Asikhule is doing about this.
The Africa Loudness Summit is here!
In July, Asikhule is presenting the Africa Loudness Summit at MediatTech 2013 with international keynote speaker Florian Camerer, the EBU author of R-128.
Covering the origin and development of the loudness wars, the current challenges in production and distribution, the emergence of both BS.1770 and R-128.
Registration is at www.asikhule.com/ loudness; or mail duncan@asikhule.com to book your place today!
