Anta Sound Replacement: Loudness Standards

George Hickman
Jul 7, 2017
2 min read

Loudness Standards..

The final stage of audio production is mastering and with that comes setting the final master level, adhering to the loudness standard. My recent sound replacement for the Anta Shoe commercial, I wanted to make sure the final product would comply to the loudness standards of the field it would be released in. The Broadcast standard follows the EBU R128, s said by r128 Audio; "European Broadcasting Union Recommendation R128 of August 2011 is a set of rules regarding loudness normalization and permitted maximum level of audio signals during broadcast." (R128 Audio, 2012) The EBU R128 brought along a new scale measurement to match to, LUFS or Loudness Units Full Scale. The level in which the EBU R128 is set to is -23LUFS.

To adhere to that standard, I had to use third party applications such as iZotope Ozone 7 to gain access to the LUFS scale. Due to not owning Ozone, I had to render out my final stereo bounce, insert it into the Ozone 7 standalone application and set it to the level accordingly. In the process, I added a simple spectral analyzer to make every frequency below 140Hz to be Mono. I did this to allow the add even more clarity and accessibility to the mix. I then rendered out the track at the same sample rate and bit depth, put it back into ableton, made sure the warp feature was off and the track was perfectly in time. The result of this process was perfect, I kept the full dynamics of my pre-Ozone master while allowing the final result to be fully broadcasted with no problem.