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

I remember looking at it quite awhile ago and my recollection is the Orban is a standalone program, no?

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.

Jeff Evans
 
Firstly start by reading a great article in Feb issue of Sound on Sound. The article is titled 'The Loudness War Won?'
 

+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.

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.

Interesting stuff. I used the Toneboosters ebu loudness, T-racks metering, Klanghelm VUMT and finally Hornets VU meter to help with my (poor boy) mastering here. I actually really liked the "perceived loudness" meter in T-racks a lot.

+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.

Daniel has made a good point and I should have mentioned it as well. A symphony can be loudness measured over an hour if necessary and still adhere to a target loudness of -23 LUFS.  The loud and soft bits won't be reflected in the overall meaurement so much but the whole thing can still maintain a target of -23 LUFS.
 
The same applies to a rock album that might go through many levels of dynamics and loudness.  Overall it too can still target -23 LUFS and there is tons of room for quiet and very loud sections.
 
The fun will start when we get an idea of how much time can be spent up loud and down soft for a given overall smallish shift of the LUFS level.  That will take some experimentation I would say but it will be fun doing it.
 
I still feel though that good VU metering puts you right in the ballpark for loudness metering. But where the VU is not so helpful is if and when you want to produce a louder section of music. (for several seconds now, not a transiet I am talking about) If you are working at K-20 to give a 0 dB VU meter reading all is well until you want to make something louder (for longer) than the 3 dB extra that is shown on the normal VU meter scale above 0 dBVU.
 
The Orban meter also has a VU meter on board and it is very cool in that regard. You can set it to show whatever you like. For example if you are working down at -20 you can leave it there and it will just peak to -20 on the scale. (Which is easy to see because the scale goes down to -30) But you can also add 10 dB of gain to that meter so it now peaks up to -10 instead. In this case -10 actually means -20. But there is 15 dB of clear headrom above -10 that can be easily seen making it more useful for loud sections of music if you ever want that. The Orban VU meter will also indicate down between -25 and -30 which a normal VU meter cannot do.

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 have not heard of the iTunes store doing any kind of level adjustments, and they have a pretty strict standard when it comes to classical music.  I have several published titles there and no level adjustment have been done.  All the conversion is up to the distributors like CD baby for independent releases or the upper level record companies.  They would know better than to make changes after the audio has been converted to a lossy format.
 
The iTunes player does have some built in effects that should be disabled.  I have had some clients ask me about possible compression levels but it was just their iTunes settings.  
 
Fortunately there is no way outside of the FCC or other country's equivalent government broadcasting organizations to regulate audio levels.  And they do not regulate recorded music, only broadcast standards.  For now we are all safe to make informed judgements on how our music should sound.  At least until it reaches the consumers' or broadcasters' hands.