Skip to main content ↑ ↓

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Standardized 'Loudness' Measurement for CDs? (Read 2830 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Standardized 'Loudness' Measurement for CDs?

Hi All,

Sorry if I'm showing my ignorance, but I've been stewing over the 'loudness wars' for some time now, and an thought came to me tonight.  I'm sure its been brought up before, but a quick search of hydrogen audio after a couple beers this evening didn't lead me straight to it....  My apologies if my inebriation has dulled my search capabilities, but my attention span suffers an alcohol induced deficit similar to ADD, so I thought I'd just post my question before nodding off while searching. :-)

So, after some reading on the loudness wars, I've noticed that a number of sites are showing some very telling graphs of the effects of increasing mastered volume to the point that dynamic range is virtually non-existent, and most peaks are clipped. 

Has anyone come up with a definitive way to measure how badly clipped a song/CD is?  My thought is that if some sort of standardized measurement leading to a 'loudness number' was available for various CDs/ recordings, it might help in advising folks as to the 'quality' of the recoding (sorry - I know there' a lot more to quality than just the amount of clipping, but for argument's sake, this could be a useful indicator).

If this has been discussed previously, any pointers to those discussions would be appreciated.  If there are already standardized measurements defined, any pointers to those standards or their implementations would also be appreciated.

Thanks in advance - and I hope everyone is enjoying their Saturday evening!

Peace,
Brawny
 

Standardized 'Loudness' Measurement for CDs?

Reply #2 –
Don't confuse "loudness", "dynamic range" and "clipping". They are related concepts but not congruent.

Clipping detection, and generally any sort of quality metric, is extremely difficult to do right. Loudness/DR meters are very imperfect devices for evaluating clipping.