Thomas Lund, TC Electronic Development Manager HD
At the 133rd AES Convention at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Workshop W5, titled “The Loudness Wars: The Wrong Drug,” will take place on Saturday, October 27, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Room 133. The workshop is chaired by Thomas Lund, HD Development Manager at TC Electronic (pictured), and panelists John C. Atkinson of Stereophile magazine; Florian Camerer, Chairman of the EBU P/LOUD Group; mastering engineer Bob Katz, owner of Digital Domain Mastering in Orlando, Fla.; and George Massenburg, associate professor at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
As stated by Lund in the Workshop’s abstract: “Newly produced pop/rock music rarely sounds good on fine loudspeakers. Could it be that the wrong mastering drug has been used for decades, affecting Peak to Average Ratio instead of Loudness Range? With grim side effects all around—and years of our music heritage irreversibly harmed—the panel provides a new status on the loudness wars and sets out to investigate the difference between the two from a technical, a perceptual, and a practical point of view. In a normalized world, bad drugs will no longer be compensated by a benefit of being loud. Learn to distinguish between a cure and quack practice, and save your next album.”
