Audition Deep Dive: Loudness Correction

Loudness has become one of the biggest topics in broadcast over the last few years, as most countries have introduced requirements to balance program volume across all content. It’s not a guessing game, however, and standards have been clearly defined for the USA, Europe, Japan, Australia, and many other regions. A few years ago, Audition first offered loudness correction for broadcast users within our Match Volume panel, later introducing the real-time Radar Loudness metering panel, licensed by our partners at TC Electronic. Since then, many users requested Audition expand the loudness correction tool to support new and updated standards and additional features, as well as reduce the steps needed to ensure a project in Premiere was ready for broadcast. I’m very happy to announce that our team responded, introducing new presets for ATSC and EBU, and adding True Peak Limiting. We also put the exact same functionality into Adobe Media Encoder and Premiere Pro!

In the Match To dropdown, select the preset for your region or adjust the parameters to your custom settings, and we’ll remember them for next time. ITU-R BS.1770-3 has been updated to meet the latest standards, and is the foundation upon which most other loudness legislation is based upon. ATSC A/85 meets the U.S. regulations, and EBU R128 is calibrated for European distribution.

Match True Peak Level ensures your intra-sample signals will NEVER clip, which is not always the case with standard limiters. A normal hard limiter limits sample values, preventing any single sample from exceeding the limit, however, there are situations as consecutive samples approach the limit where the signal can clip even though no sample has. True Peak limiting looks ahead and calculates whether the signal will clip between samples, and will adjust accordingly. (We also added True Peak limiting to our Hard Limiter effect, so you can use it with your existing, non-broadcast loudness workflows, too!)

As I mentioned, we also put these same world-class automated loudness correction tools in Premiere Pro and AME, so you don’t need to take a special trip to Audition if you’re not already mixing and mastering your audio there.. When you export a sequence, find the new Loudness section located in the export Effects group. Same options, same results! You can also choose to export a Loudness Report which is an XML-based document that contains the analysis and correction details, which is required for many locales or organizations.