TC Electronic s omas Lund Presents New Broadcast Papers at NAB 04

TC Electronic's Thomas Lund Presents New Broadcast Papers at NAB 2014 27 Mar 2014

Thomas Lund, CTO for Broadcast & Production, has been one of the driving research forces and leading experts in the field of audio loudness for more than a decade. At NAB 2014, he presents two new papers.

Audio Quality in Radio and in Streaming

Paper description: Audio quality is shown to have systematically decreased on music releases over the past 20 years. FM radio with its severely restricted headroom, and internet streaming relying heavily on lossy data reduction, have both been part of a vicious spiral rendering two decades of our music heritage damaged. Today its difficult for a consumer to find audio of even just the quality of compact cassette from 40 years ago, and it has come to a point where radio sound is so fatiguing that listeners are better off with bad loudspeakers than good ones. This paper debunks myths about reach in FM broadcast, and it describes the steps radio and internet stations must take to become part of a solution rather than part of a problem. Its no longer required to needlessly squash the literal life-giving qualities out of the music in order to prevent level from jumping annoyingly between tracks or announcements.

Date: Tuesday, April 8 , 11:00 am - 11:30 am

Part of: Broadcast Facilities (Part 1)

Location: S228

Education Program: Broadcast Engineering Conference

Loudness vs Speech Normalization in Broadcast

Paper description: The paper presents an empirical study of the differences between level-normalization of programs using the two dominant methods: loudness normalization and speech (dialog) normalization. Instead of adding to the continuing debate of the subjective merits of one method over the other, important technical aspects are focused on here. The difference in normalization level between the two measures was up to 14 dB. For all films and programs the loudness method provided the greatest headroom. All programs and a majority of the films could be broadcast at a fixed Target level of -24 LKFS without dynamics processing. Not a single film could be broadcast under the same conditions without applying dynamics processing. The study furthermore finds a notable and systematic difference between manual speech measurement and automatic speech measurement, in some cases more than 8 dB. Uncertainties in classification, in measurement and in definition are described and compared against the requirements for precision in ITU and ATSC loudness-based standards.

Date: Wednesday, April 9 , 3:30 pm - 4:00 pm

Part of: CALM Compliance Issues

Location: S227

LINK:	http://www.theiabm.org/article.php?group_id=11409...
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