TC Electronic Radar Meter Bundle TDM - Manual (Page 11)

LM5/LM5D & AM6 -TDM / 9
ENGLISHENGLISH
THE RADAR METER IN USE
The meter displays momentary loudness and Loudness History in a single, unique
Radar View, see Fig. 3. The circular, color-coded display makes it easy to balance
audio visually and to see when level falls below or exceeds the end-listener’s loudness
range tolerance.
Fig. 3 shows a scene from Desperate Housewives which is generally too soft. It’s a
tremendous help for a mixing engineer or a video editor to know which radar area
to stay inside as shown in Fig. 6, where a film scene (Pirates “On Stranger Tides”)
clearly falls outside normal broadcast expectations.
Fig. 6
The radar itself is complemented by a true-peak warning and by two numbers to
characterize the entire loudness ‘landscape’ of a program, film or music track
precisely. By default, the numbers displayed are Program Loudness and Loudness
Range.
Program Loudness is a standardized integrating loudness measurement. If one
program should be aligned in loudness with another using only a gain offset, that
offset would be the difference between the Program Loudness values of the two.
Practically speaking, both programs should simply be normalized to a certain Target
Loudness. In the US, the value to aim for is –24 LUFS. That number is directly
compatible with AC3’s dialnorm parameter which should also be set to 24.
Loudness Range is a standardized measure of the loudness range of a program and
measures the difference between soft and loud parts. From an application’s point of
view, Loudness Range is compelling 1) as a production guideline, 2) for prediction
of platform compliance during ingest or on a server and 3) for verifying a transparent
signal path all the way from the studio to the home-listener. Note that the number
stays the same downstream of production, even if a program is later normalized.