Loudness Standards

Hey hey! Happy Friday.

Let's talk 'loudness'.

The battle for loudness in the Music industry has been a long waged war to get the smallest RMS value in order to stay competitive against the next song. This seemingly never-ending cycle is a product of the industry not having set in stone 'loudness standards'; in which entertainment industries such as broadcast, film and games abide by their respective guidelines.

So below is an embed of my recent sound replacement project for an ANTA Sportswear advert:

The mastered audio for this Vimeo stream has an LKFS (loudness k-weighted, relative to full scale) of -18.5. The AES released a set of guidelines fairly recently (October 2015), in regards to recommended loudness levels for audio streaming and network file playback.

Here's a quick link to the full document here: http://www.aes.org/technical/documents/AESTD1004_1_15_10.pdf

AES recommends that for network streaming, you should aim for a range between -16 to -20 LKFS. The purpose for this is to find a balance between dynamic range and reducing excessive peak limiting, whilst improving the audibility on mobile devices. Another reasoning is that since Vimeo doesn't have loudness standards in place, by sticking to another set of guidelines - other videos are most likely going to be much louder than yours. Consumers don't want to have to constantly be turning up and down the volume to hear your work, to then get their eardrums blasted by another video.

However, I bounced a separate master file out which abides to a different set of guidelines, which would be appropriate if this advert was going to broadcast in Australia.

Free TV in Australia follows the 'OP59' practices. Our standards closely match the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) 'BS.1770' which is used in the United States. These standards recommend a loudness level of -24 LFKS.

So if this advert were to go to air, and it's LKFS exceeds -24, normalising will occur and the levels will be attenuated to match the standards in place. Below is a screenshot of a free loudness metering plugin I utilised to try and get my master sitting as close as possible to the target. You can see on average I'm sitting quite close to -24 for most of the 30 second advert, however as seen in the bottom-right hand corner, some of the louder peaks are being caught in the busier sections. Those are most likely the punch of the tennis hit sounds I created.

As music streaming services have been skyrocketing over the past couple of years, loudness standards for music streaming have started to come into play as well! Spotify now utilises an LKFS of -14, which means that anything louder than that will be brought down. Have a listen to one of your favourite tracks on SoundCloud, and then have a listen to the same song on Spotify - you'll most likely notice a large difference in audio levels.

At this stage however, in my opinion since it's not 'industry standard' across the majority of platforms my music could be played through: I don't think I would master my music/ask an engineer to master it for that loudness. For the time being, maybe I would enquire about different versions for the various distribution targets. But I feel at this time I would be disadvantaging myself if I only had one version of the final product handed to me that was much quieter than music I'm competing with in my genre.

It'll be interesting to see how this all pans out in the next 12 months!

- Lachy