Elbow's "Seldom Seen Kid"

This CD was the first place I heard mention of TurnMeUp.org. Did I mention it's a great set of music?

PandoraBoy is playing Underwater Love (Live) from the album "Flying Away" by Smoke City

Mastering In The Age of New Media Article

Gavin Lurssen has written an interesting article for Pro Sound News discussing the compact disc loudness battle and the fact that some artists are bringing dynamics back to recorded music.

PandoraBoy is playing Lurgee from the album "Pablo Honey" by Radiohead

Turn Me Up

There's a move on the restore dynamics to recorded music and now there is an organization dedicated to this very topic. Check out TurnMeUp.org

PandoraBoy is playing Gianaina from the album "Handwritten Notes" by Preston Reed

Technorati Tags:
Audio, Loudness

Dolby Volume, The Newest Attempt to Fix Loudness (from CES)

Dolby has a new scheme to fix the level differences between absolutely everything on television these days. They've introduced a scheme called Dolby Loudness that doesn't care what the signal is, it will automatically set the loudness and should make everything sound essentially the same to the human ear. Now all they need to do is get manufacturers to add this option in their upcoming products, which may be more difficult than anyone thinks.

Dolby already came up with a way to correct loudness in digital television, called Dialog Normalization, which is part of the ATSC specification, but no one plays by the rules for a multitude of reasons, so it doesn't work. It could, but it would require too many changes in too many places, and analog television would not change. Also, even the digital television signal can be destroyed, either in the home by some funky processing stage in a bit of your gear (most likely the television itself or the cable box) or at the cable company (though this is far less likely with digital than it is with analog tv).

So, hats off to Dolby for continuing to try and fix these problems. Now if they can just get all the other kids to play nice...

iTunes is playing Seven Days from the album "True Colours" by Level 42

Technorati Tags: Audio, Loudness, Television

Digidesign mBox 2 Mini

This looks like an awesome interface for Pro Tools, at least for those of us that are portable backpack audio geeks.

iTunes is playing Story Of Light from the album "Strange Cargo III" by William Orbit

Technorati Tags: Audio, Gear, Pro Tools

What Are Large Format Digital Audio Consoles?

They're audio mixing boards, similar to those you'd see in recording studios, but designed primarily for live broadcasting. The versions we're looking at are digital as opposed to analog, so the mixing surface has no, or at least very little, actual audio in it. They are actually huge remote controls. They're also complicated and expensive beasts with lots of blinking lights and knobs which, in the end, is why guys really become audio engineers.

Here are some we're currently looking at.
http://www.lawo.de/us/fr04/produkte/mc2_90.htm
http://www.lawo.de/us/fr04/produkte/mc2_66.htm
http://www.calrec.com/product/alpha.htm
http://www.solid-state-logic.com/broadcast/c100.html
http://www.studer.ch/includes/product_sheet_include.aspx?product_id=34&menu_id=3&sub_menu_id=9&locale=en


iTunes is playing Grace Under Pressure from the album "Cast of Thousands (North American)" by Elbow

Technorati Tags: Audio, Gear, Mixers

What is Loudness Anyway?

Ever watch television and have the sound volume from the commercials blow you out of your chair? Ever wonder why some channels seems so loud and others are so low you have to turn the volume up to hear the sound? These are all issues of television broadcast loudness and there are a lot of people working to solve these problems. Unfortunately there are also a lot of others who don't seem to care as long as they're making money and others who WANT their stuff to be louder than everyone else's.

iTunes is playing St. Charlene from the album "Birds, Beasts, and Flowers - EP" by Hem

Technorati Tags: Audio, Loudness, Television

Welcome to the Audio Blog

I'll occasionally post things here related to audio, making noise and the loss of quality in sound and it's meaning to our culture.

Currently I'm involved in research into broadcast loudness and audio levels as well as research into large format digital audio consoles.

More than likely, stuff will get posted here just to get it off my chest.

More to come...

iTunes is playing Indian Pepper (Pimenta Malagueta) from the album "Cascades / Rapid Transit" by Azymuth

Technorati Tags: Audio, Personal