Product Review - Izotope Insight

The new broadcast standards require that material is balanced using ‘loudness normalisation’, where the relative loudness is determined by a new form of meter complying with the ITU-R BS.1770 (and related) specifications. The aim of this new approach is primarily to overcome the hugely annoying problem of widely varying levels when switching between TV stations, or during ad breaks within a programme, and it is working extremely well for those broadcasters that have already adopted this new way of working. Most major broadcasters will adopt the system over the coming year, and work has already started on adapting the format for the radio industry. The really interesting side-effect of loudness normalisation, though, is what happens to hyper-compressed, peak-normalised material. As you might expect, it ends up sounding really weak, feeble, and utterly boring because it has no dynamics! Everyone’s music ends up sounding as loud as everyone else’s, because that’s what loudness normalisation does, but the reintroduction of a headroom margin allows — and even encourages — the kind of wide, natural, dynamic range that has been practically lost through the ‘loudness wars’. Music can be punchy and dynamic once again, with creative light and shade, choruses louder than versus, and a sense of vitality that an entire generation probably doesn’t know to be possible!