On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 01:23:48PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Wednesday 26 September 2012 12:58:35 Fons Adriaensen did opine:
>
> > There is more to fix.
> >
> > The meterbridge website still claims that those meters 'almost' conform
> > to some standards while in fact they even don't come close.
> >
> > According to the standard, a VU measures the average of the absolute
> > value. For a steady input signal around 1 kHz, it must rise to 99% of
> > the real value in 300ms and overshoot it by 1 to 1.5% before falling
> > back to 100%. The one from meterbridge measures RMS and rises to the
> > final value in around 5.3ms, that is more than 50 times too fast (at
> > a sample rate of 48 kHz, and worse for higher sample rates).
> >
> > According to the standards, a PPM or IEC meter must have a controlled
> > rise time of 5 or 10ms (depending on the standard). The one from
> > meterbridge indicates peak sample values instead.
> >
> > Ciao,
>
> You are very correct, Fons. However, as a BC engineer, I have observed
> severe clipping of the waveforms because they exceeded the headroom of the
> DA's, which in this case was _+28 dbm, while the true vu meter sitting on
> that same line was reading -3dbm peaks. For average loudness readings the
> legal and pricey vu meter is fairly accurate, but it fails to detect the
> transients in todays music, or even in tv's spoken dialog during a soap,
> where the human ear as assaulted by the clipping cracklies the 70 year old
> analog std meter simply doesn't detect. To that end, the best production
> audio boards are also equipt with the much faster LED setups that latch
> such a peak condition excursion for at least 100 milliseconds to make it
> obvious a peak has been exceeded.
>
> To that end, the operators under my control have always been instructed to
> take it down a snudge until the overload LED at +16dbm only blinks at 5
> second or more intervals. Listener fatigue can be very apparent in much of
> todays audio streams when the old 'vu' meter is peaking at _+4.
>
> And it shows in the ratings books when those instructions are being
> ignored, folks might be fans of the program but something they only 'feel'
> makes them channel hop looking for a more pleasant experience. When 1
> point in the ratings is as important as it is to a facilities cash flow, we
> look for every conceivable advantage. Bad audio hurts.
All very true. But that's no reason to claim that something that
just looks a bit like a VU meter but behaves *very* differently
actually is a VU meter. Same for the PPMs.
The code to this correctly has been available and GPL licensed for
4 or 5 years now (jmeters), so there's no excuse.
Ciao,
-- FA A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow) _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list Linux-audio-dev@email-addr-hidden http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-devReceived on Thu Sep 27 00:15:02 2012
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