Loudness Meters

Loudness Meters

I have been getting into these recently in a big way and they are very interesting. Firstly start by reading a great article in Feb issue of Sound on Sound. The article is titled 'The Loudness War. Won?'

Very good artcile indeed. It is an important time to be aware of metering and LU metering in particular. K system metering goes a long way towards loudness metering. There is a very strong relationship between K system metering and loudness meters. In many cases it is as simple as selecting the chosen K system reference level and of course the closest level to that is K -20. I have found that if you get a mix just peaking 0 dB VU at a K-20 ref level then when you do the LU measurement it is often 1 to 2 dB below the K ref level putting most K -20 mixes at -22LUFS levels. With -23 LUFS being the standard this fits in very well.

The Loudness meter is also interesting from the point of view of the time taken to do the measurement and the fact that LUFS levels vary as the music progresses. A piece of music may have an overall loudness level over the course of the track of say -23 LUFS. But the exciting thing that loudness measurements offer is that the music can go loud and very loud as well for short bursts here and there and the overall loudness level won't be effected too much. Tansients can be consistently high over the whole track and still have an average loudness target level. What the article is saying too is use the headroom creatively!!!

Loudness meters are expensive VST's usually but the good news is that Orban have very kindly provided a free one and it is very good indeed. Certainly an excellent way to get into Loudness metering for no cost.

http://www.orban.com/meter/

A couple of extra things too.

Some test tones for setting up Loudness meters are here:

Prism Sound/Qualis Audio Loudness Meter Test Files:

http://resources.prismsound.com/tm/Loudness_Meter_Test_Signals.zip

OR

http://www.qualisaudio.com/documents/TechNote-2-WaveFiles-5-12-2011.zip

Two great articles on Loudness metering:

Qualis Audio Loudness Documents:

http://www.qualisaudio.com/documents/TechNote-1-5-31-2011.pdf

http://www.qualisaudio.com/documents/TechNote-2-5-31-2011.pdf

The Tech Note 2 article describes the test signals in detail and how to use them etc...

Another general fantastic article on Loudness metering from the Music Loudness Alliance

http://www.music-loudness.com/index.php/white-papers

Yes the Orban is a stand alone program but it can be booted up alongside you DAW as well. There are options in the Orban to pick up the mainouts of your DAW.
 
It is a little tricky getting the Orban to work though. It uses the Wave signal flow within Windows. (Although there is an ASIO option but in mine it was greyed out)
 
I use PatchMix software in conjunction with my soundcard and it has incredible routing options. All I had to was create an extra send and send my main ASIO outs to the Wave channel and it worked perfectly.
 
Lest talk about track 8 from my friend's album 'Oh Hawke' by Dan Lethbridge. Firstly McCue got it wrong in terms of what the average level was for that track. (Mike has a copy of the album) He said it was -11.6 but he was using an incorrect reference setting in Adobe Audition. (square wave instead of sine wave) With the correct setting it shows as average rms level of -8.6 which is LOUD!
 
But even so the Loudness meter really is the ultimate test. Interesting is that track has a volume level of -8.5 LUFS after doing an analysis for 3 1/2 minutes. That too is horribly loud considering the target level for loudness is going to be -23 LUFS! I would love to have mastered that track to -23 LUFS. It would have sounded wonderful.

Yes good point David but I don't think there is anything wrong either if a movement is quiet and it sits below -23 LUFS for most of the time.  It is just that in the louder movements though the average level will hit -23 LUFS.
 
The interesting thing is that very loud bits can happen within a track (movement) and the overall LUFS reading won't change much.  That for me is the most exciting thing about it.  The dynamics withing a track can be huge and still meet the -23 LUFS target.  As that article points out, use the headroom creatively.  It opens up all sorts of ideas for dynamic musical concepts.  Like we hear live for example. (hopefully!)
 
Also the fact that transients can exist now all the way through and still the average LUFS target can be met. It will only make things sound better in the long run.

+1.  I found that article fascinating.  My only concern for the future is multi-movement pieces, anything from symphonies to rock concept albums.  I hope the loudness police don't disrupt the balance of dynamics between movements just because they reside on separate tracks.  I could happen, I fear.

 
The guys who to classical balancing and mastering are well aware of this.  Symphonies are mastered as a single unit, not as individual movements.  Dynamics are manipulated manually if there is a need, and compression is used only lightly where necessary.   I don't think volume leveling software or hardware will be used in this context other than for radio play.

rumleymusic

+1.  I found that article fascinating.  My only concern for the future is multi-movement pieces, anything from symphonies to rock concept albums.  I hope the loudness police don't disrupt the balance of dynamics between movements just because they reside on separate tracks.  I could happen, I fear.

 
The guys who to classical balancing and mastering are well aware of this.  Symphonies are mastered as a single unit, not as individual movements.  Dynamics are manipulated manually if there is a need, and compression is used only lightly where necessary.   I don't think volume leveling software or hardware will be used in this context other than for radio play.

I'm thinking more of downloadable content than of CDs.  It's my understanding that iTunes does level adjustments and does so on a per "song" basis.  Since most music these days has one track = on song, this might not be so bad for a lot of music.  But download the material of a multi-movement piece and reassemble it into the larger work, and the damage may have been done.  I'm not saying this is so, but it is something that raises concerns.
 

I dont believe iTunes alters the audio either but they do have a feature called 'Sound Check' that is built into their playback software. It was mentioned in the SOS article I think. Apparently they were not prepared to give up what the value was but Bob Katz seems to think they are normalising all material to a -16.5 LUFS standard.
 
So this is roughly 6 dB higher than -23 LUFS. So iTunes analyses the overall level and makes an adjustment. If a track is at -23 LUFS then it is adding 6 db or so. But tracks that are heavily mastered to be very loud end up getting huge amounts of attenuation. What ends up happening now is those tracks end up sounding a little quieter than others that are not slammed. They also end up sounding 'small'. Great news I reckon.
 
Hopefully it means that mastering engineers once they realise this will have to stop mastering so loud once and for all. Apparently 'Sound Check' does a rather good job with lots of material and makes everything playback at a much more even volume etc. It is meant to not change the dynamics within the music just raise or lower the overall level to meet its own standard.