attendees, Swiss section meeting, 29th of April 2010
Despite a very warm and sunny April evening, around 34 AES members and guests from different and distant areas of Switzerland gathered for the first loudness meeting of AES Swiss section. Thanks to a sponsor who supported this event, the meeting was open even to non-members and the invitation has been sent also to Swisscable, the organization of cable operators in Switzerland. All speakers are members of the EBU PLOUD working group, who will release a loudness normalization recommendation very soon, called EBU R128.
Thomas Lund started his presentation with his famous demonstrations on overload effects of different systems when driven with material close to or exceeding full scale (after conversion to the analogue domain). From the introduction of ITU-R BS.1770 Loudness and True-Peak measurement, Thomas headed over to EBU R128 topics. He explained loudness tolerance and loudness range studies and how consumer STB are handling DRC. Major results of the EBU R128 are loudness normalization guidelines using BS.1770 measurement with an effective gating using a relative threshold of -8 LU, which has been independently verified in Japan by different authorities. Another important result of PLOUD is an EBU meter mode, which has been agreed by different metering manufacturers to show the same results with different brands on Momentary Loudness, Integrated Loudness, Sliding and Loudness Range. Thomas concluded with comparisons between EBU R128 and the ATSC A/85, the status in other countries and finished with some really ugly examples of the current loudness war, where music can be 6 dB louder than pink noise.
Richard van Everdingen leads the distribution subgroup of the EBU PLOUD and started his presentation with the results of analyzing loudness, PPM and peak levels of 50 channels in the Netherlands (the complete list has been published in the recent SMPTE Journal). The distribution guidelines of R128 is describing a revolutionary loudness regulation system, which allows distribution companies to control loudness of hundreds of DVB channels without decoding the MPEG streams and without affecting content integrity or signal quality. This will be the most effective tool to stop the loudness war and introduce normalize loudness. Another point is pre-emphasis limiting, which will move from the broadcaster responsibility to the distributor side where legacy analogue services are still provided. Thus digital services are no longer suffering from analogue restrictions. Richard tried to shed some light into the level structures of settop boxes with its Dolby decoders and different output formats, where it really starts to be complicated. Here also the distribution subgroup of PLOUD contributed important inputs to the EBU Tech 3333, the HDTV settop box requirement standard defined by EBU.
The evening was concluded with a sponsored apero, further discussions and an optional dinner in the pulsing area around the Technopark Zurich. AES Swiss section would like to thank all supporters of the event, next to Thomas and Richard also to Giovanni Dolci of TC Switzerland and Frans de Jong of the EBU for carrying a heavy packet of leaflets to Zurich.
The presentations and parts of the speech recordings can be downloaded from the AES Swiss Section website under Programme > Download Material. More EBU and PLOUD leaflets can be ordered from the reporter using the AES Swiss Section mail address or directly from Frans de Jong, EBU Geneva.
