Understanding Loudness Part 1 - Why Do We Need Loudness?

Not sure what all this loudness stuff is about and how it affects you? Confused about the difference between LKFS and LUFS? In this article, loudness expert Mike Thornton answers all these questions and many more in his premium tutorial series, which is now available for free.

In this tutorial, we will clarify what we mean by loudness, investigate how our hearing works, why we are changing our metering systems and the solution to loudness changes that consumers complain about.

[jemwand]

Thank you Mike Thornton, this information is golden.
It's amazing that, during the montage section, the loudest elements sounded horrendous and the quiter elements sounded both more desireable and more coherent.

[HenrikWest]

Thanks Mike! 
Looking forward to part 2!

[MalcolmoftheNorth]

A bit of historical background on Austrias “bold claim” that they have zero complaints about loudness. Florian Camerer of the Austrian national broadcaster ORF was, and still is, heavily involved in the development of the EBU R128 standard. He is a sound engineer and educator that has been meticulous about educating all of ORF’s multi-skilled staff on loudness from the early stages of this technology. ORF is not as big as for instance the BBC, so the task has not been so monumental. Nor has the implementation of technology been that costly due to ORF’s size. They have also taken the implementation of loudness normalisation a step further as they, in the play out of films, not only just normalise the audio, but also compress it slightly. (They use a very low compression ratio, but set the threshold a bit lower than one would at higher ratios. Thus reducing the loudness range moderately). The dynamic range in films are usually optimised for cinemas/movie theatres, and less suited for a good listening experience in a consumer’s home. The claim might be bold, but the Austrians have been extremely meticulous about the matter, across the full range of their content.

On a personal note, in my experience (as a broadcast sound engineer in Norway), the complaints are not so much about differences in loudness between channels anymore, but about when the loudness range within one programme (be it radio, television or podcast) becomes too large. Especially is this true in comedy, where everything hinges on intelligibility; if you can’t hear the joke, you won’t laugh. The quality of consumers equipment vary greatly (there’s a lot of bad speakers out there), and the success of a product starts with intelligibility. Achieving this is walking a knifes edge, everyone has to "hear the joke", but the product should still sound somewhat "natural". In other words, not overly processed. In achieving this, the loudness meter is of great help.

[agilkds]

It should be mention that K metering was created by Bob Katz, variyng from K20 (Music in an audiphile listening environment), K14 (music in general, home systems, etc), K12 (Broadcast production). Differs a bit from LUFS metering systems

[davidspicer]

Drives me mad when I'm watching something on TV and the background music totally drowns out the dialogue, makes you wonder who's mixing this stuff!