Loudness Basics Understanding audio loudness, and its management in production and distribution, are essential in delivering artistic intent to the audience while maintaining perceived loudness across content and source changes. Read More Loudness Normalization Exploring normalization – manual and automatic processes to manage loudness levels. Read More References and Resources A collection of relevant standards,… Continue reading Loudness Project
Physical measurements often only tell part of the story; perceptual quality judgments made by human assessors are the gold standard. There’s been a great deal of work on listening test methodologies and statistical testing to ensure that perceptual measurements are reliable and consistent. However, performing such tests is expensive, time consuming, and requires expertise.
While a lot has been said in recent years about sophisticated 3D audio involving lots of loudspeakers, it pays to revise some of the basics of two-channel stereophony. It’s remarkable just how much you can do with only two channels, perhaps surprisingly including creating a sense of immersion or envelopment.
The past decade saw substantial advancements in various areas of spatial audio. First of all, new surround sound formats employing so-called “height” loudspeakers have been introduced, aiming to provide the audience with three-dimensional (3D) listening experiences. This has led to active research on the perceptual mechanism of vertical stereophony as well as the development of new recording and mixing techniques for such formats.
Sound reinforcement has been a key topic throughout the AES’s history — one of the first papers published in the journal was on Sound Reinforcing Systems — discussing many still common problems with sound system design. While fundamental knowledge of the field has been mature for quite some time, there continue to be exciting boundary-pushing applications and difficult challenges regularly arising within the subject area.
Sound field control can be broadly interpreted as the process of creating a set of loudspeaker signals to create a certain listening experience over a listening area. The desired sound fields may be physically or perceptually defined, and can cover a wide range of use-cases.
A collection of resources on audio recording
With the omnipresence of digital multimedia data, the processing, analysis, and understanding of such data by means of automated methods has become a central issue in engineering and computer science.
Loudspeakers radiate sound in multiple directions, not always equally.
For anyone interested in music recording, the E-Library is a well of treasures, containing collected experiences, thoughts and ideas about this subject.
