Looking to play a role in developing worldwide standards for audio loudness levels on television, TC Electronic, a Denmark-based provider of digital signal processing and loudness control technologies, is showing its new LM2 stereo loudness and true-peak level meter at this year’s AES 2010 convention. The LM2 meter provides a full range of loudness adjustments to ensure quality in audio applications while eliminating level jumps and other aural inconsistencies.
The LM2 meter is ideal for a variety of broadcast audio applications. During ingest, it can be employed to measure loudness and the true-peak level of incoming audio signals, revealing any signal overloads. Built-in gain normalization enables it to correct gain to a preset loudness level, while a 48-bit precision limiter ensures that if the gain has been positively invoked, there will be no overloads.
Pretransmission, the LM2 can log the outgoing loudness level of the broadcast station for a full week. Detailed log files may be imported into Excel, and the LM2 needs no connection to a computer besides when log files are dumped. Post-transmission, the LM2 can be used to monitor and log what is sent out.
The LM2 is fully compliant with the European R128 loudness standard as well as all U.S. standards. The meter analyzes any audio and assigns it an ATSC A/85- or EBU R128-compliant loudness number. These numbers may be used to normalize programs, commercials and music tracks, and to set metadata in AC3 transmission. This eliminates level jumps and other inconsistencies sometimes caused by human error.
Users can view the loudness numbers generated by the LM2 on the meter’s front panel or stats display. Connecting the LM2 to a PC or Mac via USB allows access to TC Electronic’s radar meter technology, which displays loudness over a given period of time. The radar can show loudness data from up to 24 hours back in time, even if there was no connection to a computer during that period.
