From PPM to LUFS

Spent 2 days at the London BVE at Earl’s Court last week and teamed up with Nick Murphy from the Sound Company. We had our ears to the ground in search of anything to do with loudness. BVE came up trumps. Plenty of ubersmart people to quiz on the “whats” and “whys” of the new audio standards and to give us a solid grounding on how the industry is adapting itself and how we can gear ourselves to getting it right, throughout our workflows.

So, is LUFS the new PPM yet or are we still getting there? As we’re in the market for adaptations,  playing out to a number and variety of global destinations has revealed anomalies and difficulties in the new loudness metering standards. It seems that the one size fits all solution of the good old PPM has now fragmented into more subtle variations across stations using the new LUFS system. Some stations still require PPM while others demand that their interpretation of the EBU R128 standard be met. Some stations are more aggressive than others in upholding the new standard.

So, while we’re all kitted up to measure LUFS and make good technically and creatively on the audio mix, it seems that the different  audio requirement across the stations means that the old days of one PPM mix for multiple destinations has turned into one mix per station.

FYI: We’re currently using Nugen LMB file based LUF metering and correction tool for our QC process. It gives us a graphic representation which we can copy and paste into our QC records as well as keeping a log of all files processed. It does have an auto fix option too for the brave but, we’re leaving that to the Sound Company for now. We’re looking to implement hardware and have our eye on the Tektronix range however, we’re not jumping into anything so as not to make any costly mistakes.

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