AN END TO THE LOUDNESS WARS.

I bet you’ve always wondered what music would sound like if the bottom 8 bits of 16-bit sound were ever used for anything at all. This is promising: the ITU has defined a unit of loudness, and the European Broadcasting Union is making it a recommendation. What this means is that recordings with no dynamic range will end up played apparently more quietly than recordings with dynamic range. The US has also passed the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act so that ad breaks don’t blare. We can but hope. I SAID, “WE CAN BUT HOPE.”