User`s manual

LM6 - Radar Loudness Meter / 7
EN
measures, low dynamic range signatures end up the loudest as shown by the red line
in Fig 1, right. Audio production is therefore trapped in a downwards spiral, going for
ever decreasing dynamic range. By now, the pop music industry is “right of” In Flight
Entertainment in the illustration.
LM6/LM2offersastandardizedoption:ThevisualizationofloudnesshistoryandDRT
in combination with long-term descriptors from production onwards, is a transparent
and well sounding alternative to our current peak level obsession. Not only for music,
but also in production for broadcast or film. The engineer, who may not be an audio
expert, should be able to identify and consciously work with loudness developments
within the limits of a target distribution platform, and with predictable results when the
program is transcoded to another platform.
LM6thereforecolorcodesloudnesssoit’seasytoidentifytargetlevel(green),below
thenoisefloorlevel(blue),orloudevents(yellow),seeFig2.
Fig 2
Color coding and target loudness for
selected broadcast platforms based on a
consumer’s Dynamic Range Tolerance,
DRT. The aim is to center dynamic range
restriction around average loudness,
in this case the –20 dB line, thereby
automatically avoiding to wash out
differences between foreground and
background elements of a mix.
Note how different the broadcast
requirements are from those of Cinema.
Whenproductionengineersrealizethe
boundaries they should generally stay
within, less dynamics processing is
automatically needed during distribution,
and the requirement for maintaining
time-consuming meta-data at a broadcast
stationisminimized.
In broadcast, the goal is to use the same loudness measure for: Production, Ingest,
Linking, Master Control Processing and Logging - thereby ensuring better audio
qualitynotonlyinDTVaudio,butacrossallbroadcastplatforms.LM6andTC
processing can co-exist with PPM meters, VU meters or Dolby’s LM100 meter.
LM6greatlyincreasestheusabilityofLM100inproductionenvironmentsbecause
itprovidesrunningstatus,andgivesastandardizedandintuitiveindicationofboth
dialog and non-dialog program.