OT: Bob Katz anounces the end of the "loudness war" and what is "normalizing "?

1) In a nutshell the article gave a pretty good definition "This brings the volume of quiet songs up and pushes louder songs down."
2) absolutely

I think Katz is broadly right about this, though he's missing a huge part of the picture, which is all the music listening done on the likes of Soundcloud and Bandcamp and so on. Itunes and Spotify aren't anywhere near the whole pie. So I think it might take a bit longer than he hopes for this to become standard. But I think it will happen.

I guess I will believe it when it actually happens. Market tends to be driven more by demand than expert opinion. Sales of headphones designed more for loudness than quality thrive. Beats audio being worth 3.2 billion is a testament to that. The average pop consumer seems to prefer loud and care less about dynamics. I read an article about how Kanye West ( yes, he's a loudmouth narcissist but a very successfull loudmouth narcissist) has pulled his own songs off the market and re-released after hearing them in club and determing original master was not loud enough compared to peers songs heard within same set.

Keith touches on something I think reflects the main consumer concern. IMHO the majority of radio listeners could care less about dynamic range in music. It's the loud commercials that drive them nuts. This generation has been spoonfed a steady diet of squashed mp3 based loud pop long enough that songs not mixed in that way are often percieved as weak in comparison. That is sad but certainy is my experience when dealing with kids at studio

Thanks for your explanations and opinions, really helpful .
I´m asking myself how my new ( first time self -mastered)
songs sound after "normalization..................."
Anybody here know´s how to normalize (in X3?)?
I remember a normalize function in the good old Logic 5,
which I never used.

Just checked out my favorite new music on Sound Forge to see what the files look like:  it's Conquering Dystopia, a Technical Death Metal project released a few months ago.  The files look like a continuous bar at 0dB--completely squashed.  It's one of the loudest albums I've heard.  And yet . . . somehow it sounds great, as if there are dynamics.  Unfortunately, mixing and mastering engineers are getting better and better at the loudness wars.

John T

microapp
I agree with Katz's intention to restore dynamic range to recorded music.
A new metering scale is NOT going to accomplish this.

You're misreading him. He's saying that new broadcast standards are what will make it happen, not metering. The recommended metering approaches are simply to help people mix and master in an optimal way for those standards.

Exactly, with new standards in place (eg iTunes@ -16 LUFS) all material regardles of their RMS value is adjusted to that value.

In essence record/ master with lower RMS values keeping the dynamics (as the squashed material will only be lowered anyway & will probably translate into sounding worse.)

 
I am confused. Is Katz the only sound guy who thinks that the "loudness wars" is actually about loudness ie. peak volume? What he seems to be describing is an algorithm that sets the overall volume of a song based on keeping the peak volume the same for various recordings. That kind of peak limiting has been built into MP3 players or the software used to load them with songs for a long time. The goal was to be able to keep jogging without having to stop to adjust the volume so your ears didn't bleed on your sweatsuit.
 
But what most people seem to be talking about in the loudness wars issue is compression, raising the low volume parts to limit the dynamic range. The average listener can pump the output gain as high as his damaged hair cells can tolerate regardless of how the sound is compressed. But what seems to be appealing to him is that the volume never drops below his threshold of over-stimulation. I listen to music at levels my young acquaintances can barely hear, but even at low levels the difference between highly compressed sound and sound with a wide dynamic range is obvious. My young friends prefer it like that, and if forced to listen to an over-compressed song at a lower peak volume or one with a wide dynamic range that is rattling their ossicles on the peaks, they would pick the less loud but more compressed version.
 
If that is correct, i.e. what the recording industry has been working to achieve in order to sell to the masses, is not "loudness," which after all could be done with a gain knob, but highly compressed audio. If that is what the consumer craves, how does this help retrain them to love dynamic range?

In europe now many radio stations mix/master to R128 -23 LUFS.
A youtube vid of F. Tischmeier about the normalisation and the new  standard
eyplains a lot ,so that even I can understand this standard and the old behaviour of
radio and tv stations in europe.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7mUKbi8CEg

FWIW, when mastering I'm often asked to make it as loud as possible. But if I like the music I'll often do two versions, one the way the client thinks they want it, the other the way I want it. Most of the time, they'll choose the version with more dynamics when they have a chance to compare side-by-side.
 
However I do have several techniques that make for a "loud" sound but preserve dynamics to a large degree, and that helps the cause...it sort of weans them off the super-loud aspect.

I hope that it can be applied to TV ads too.