Dave Moulton

This column is devoted to the basics of audio compression, a powerful signal-processing technique that is poorly understood by almost all of us.

This column will be devoted to the basics of time-domain signalprocessing effects, most notably reverb.

I know, I know! I promised you that I was done with resolution issues. But as I wrapped up my rant, a couple of industry pros really got on my case about some of the things I was saying.

Alert readers will recall that last month I began a discussion of how we try to determine what it is that we humans can really hear.

I promised last month I’d talk a little more about the design of control rooms, as part of our inquiry into the care and feeding of loudspeakers.

As I noted a couple months back, we tend to devalue the more familiar and prosaic items in our technology toolkit. It seems to me that we’re particularly indifferent to loudspeakers.

Alert readers may recall that for the past year I’ve been devoting most of this column to the CALM Act and the related issue of audio levels and loudness in broadcast television audio.

I don’t know how many TV Technology readers know of Neil Muncy. However, it is highly improbable that any of us haven’t heard his work.

We also seem to have fractured our physical audio delivery systems into four distinctly different genres, all served by the same HD digital audio feed embedded in our productions.

The protocol is for modifying the television audio signal to measure its magnitude in a way that more closely agrees with humans' subjective sense of loudness

A key ingredient of almost any successful stereo production

This is not easy to do, and impossible to do perfectly.

Their performance and effectiveness can be highly variable for a range of not-so-obvious reasons.

We would like all equipment to play back at the same calibrated level, including in our viewers' homes. To achieve that, we use a protocol called dialnorm.

The first thing to keep in mind is that we are talking about a pair of signals here, not a single mono signal.

You may recall I've been ranting about variance in loudness levels on broadcast television for numerous years.

You need to get a handle on the actual measured levels at which you are working.