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Re: standard audio levels

Posted by balUns (P) on July 10, 2001 at 02:11:18

In Reply to: Re: standard audio levels posted by Roland on July 9, 2001 at 17:16:12:

I don't think that television levels sound the same (even though they are). Commercials (and sometimes other shows) seem louder than programs because of the extreme compression and EQ used to exploit our hearing's curve of sensitivity. Of course if shows were mixed with that degree of compression, we'd all just turn down the volume and/or miss out on whisper-to-scream dynamism. So EQ curve and compression, together, give us a subjective sense of a signal's volume. And something that peaks at zero dBFS can easily sound much quieter than something which peaks at -4 dBFS, provided that the average gain and frequency content, of the signal which peaks at -4 dBFS, more favorably resemble volume to our ears. Mastering, or rather, "pre mastering," is really the only way to make the gain of various soundfiles seem uniform. That's because gain can either seem the same, or be the same. But, unless we're talking about the exact same instruments playing the exact same notes with the exact same intensity, etc..., different recordings that have an average gain of -18 dBFS, and peak at exactly no more than -.5 dBFS, can still end up sounding quite different in volume. Adjustments in compression, limiting, stereoization, and EQ will need to be applied on a case by case basis. Any fix-all approach, such as normalization, will only approximate uniform loudness, but in a very unreliable, ineffective way. Normalization, as you may know, does bring the peaks of a signal to full scale. But it doesn't change the crest factor, which is the difference between the average gain and the transient peaks. Hope this is of some relevance...
For more info on leveling see Bob Katz web site http://www.digido.com/. He's one of my audio gurus.

Respectfully,
BalUns

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