CHURCH TECH
LUFS ’N’ STUFF | Bill Gibson
It’s not good when your audio or video production
is in a playlist and stands out because it sounds
too quiet or too loud—a consideration that’s
important for all of your productions. This article
is all about finding a way to equate loudness
between media productions, to make sure
that, from a loudness standpoint, your work
fits in with other similar work. Quantifying
loudness is important whether you’re creating
an album release, instructional video, podcast,
advertisement, live stream, or any other type
of media production that’ll be heard and/or
viewed along with other similar productions.
THE LOUDNESS WARS WERE REAL
Most of us think of the Loudness Wars as
something that happened in the mid-2000s
and culminated in 2008 with Metallica’s Death
Magnet, the acknowledged winner of the
most clipped, badly distorted, and blockiest
waveform award—hmm, didn’t they used to
have a Grammy for that category? Anyway, it
was universally recognized that the audio world
had finally gone mad and that it was time to
assess how and why we had gotten that way,
and to hopefully bring a little sanity to the
madness.
To take a step back, this really all started in the
’40s when artists and managers noticed that
when their music was played in rotation with
other similar music, like on a radio station or
when music managers were picking what
they wanted to play on the radio, the louder
songs were the ones that stood out as the
coolest—hmm, maybe it was “groovy” then…
or “cherry”…nah, too ’60s…I keep hearing a
young girl in a ’40s movie I must have watched
saying, “Gee Jake, that’s swell.” Okay, the
louder songs sounded swell and the quiet
tunes weren’t so swell.
Artists in the ’40s started asking mastering
engineers for their 7-inch records to be cut
so they sounded louder. And, thus began the
loudness war. Motown jumped on the same
bandwagon and their records were some of
the loudest of the day. It really built from there.
I was very actively recording in 2008 and in
1998 and even 1988! I’m still very active in
the industry today and I can attest that, as the
engineer and/or producer, you never want to
hear something you toiled over for hours/days/
months/years to come onto a radio show or to
be played in an iTunes playlist and sound “less
than” the other music. That’s just unbearable—
sonic quality be damned! Oops! Church mag…
my bad…. Sonic quality be darned! It’s natural
that you want your tune to come up and
sound louder and more special and you want
all of those other producers and engineers to
think, “Dear Jesus! Please bless my enemy in
audio production who is making my production
sound less than!”
So, as it turned out in 2008, some artists started
to open up to producing music that contained
dynamics. Many, when given the opportunity to
compare their music with and without dynamic
interest, learned that there was something to
be said for dynamics after all. And amazingly,
the transition was pretty immediate, with signs
of change appearing late in the same year
that Death Magnet came out. But, that wasn’t
the end of it. Some artists still wanted their
music loud, so there was a time period where
a diverse playlist would keep you stabbing at
your iPod or iPhone volume control.
At the same time, the television industry
was going through a very similar volumeinconsistency
problem. There was a big
difference between the television program
level and the commercial advertisement level.
Advertisers learned that if their ads were louder
they had a better chance of keeping viewers in
front of the TV during the commercial breaks,
but if there was a dip in volume or intensity
in anyway, their audience would be off to the
bathroom or kitchen or... Even though TV and
radio stations all used limiters on their final
output to ensure that they didn’t exceed 100%
saturation of their designated frequency band,
as specified by the FCC, material that was
already loud still sounded louder.
114 August 2020
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