There is a consensus among many in the audio industry that recorded music has grown increasingly compressed over the past few decades. Some industry professionals are concerned that this compression often results in poor audio quality with little dynamic range. Although some algorithms have been proposed for calculating dynamic range, we have not been able to find any studies suggesting that any of these metrics accurately represent any perceptual dimension of the measured sound. In this paper, we review the various proposed algorithms and compare their results with the results of a listening test. We show that none of the tested metrics accurately predict the perceived dynamic range of a musical track, but we identify some potential directions for future work.

Authors: Boley, Jon; Danner, Christopher; Lester, Michael
Affiliations: LSB Audio LLC, Lafayette, IN, USA; Shure Incorporated, Nilea, IL, USA; University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA(See document for exact affiliation information.)
AES Convention: 129 (November 2010) Paper Number: 8178
Publication Date: November 4, 2010
Subject: Loudness and Dynamics

Click to purchase paper as a non-member or you can login as an AES member to see more options.

No AES members have commented on this paper yet.

Subscribe to this discussion

To be notified of new comments on this paper you can subscribe to this RSS feed. Forum users should login to see additional options.

Start a discussion!

If you would like to start a discussion about this paper and are an AES member then you can login here:
Username:
Password:

If you are not yet an AES member and have something important to say about this paper then we urge you to join the AES today and make your voice heard. You can join online today by clicking here.