Given its appearance in one form or another in all but the cheapest audio gear produced in the last 70 years or so, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the ubiquitous VU meter is just one of those electronic add-ons that’s more a result of marketing than engineering. After all, the seemingly arbitrary scale and the vague “volume units” label makes it seem like something a manufacturer would slap on a device just to make it look good. And while that no doubt happens, it turns out that the concept of a VU meter and its execution has some serious engineering behind that belies the really simple question it seeks to answer: how loud is this audio signal?
I love analog VU meters, and I’m kind of sad regular, non-professional music equipment has done away with them entirely.
Agreed. In school, my projects weren’t finished until I found a way to bolt a VU meter and at least one LED somewhere in the circuit.
As long as you can turn the volume knob to 11 it hardly matters.
Suppose Thom likes RGB
RGY. VU meters never had blue.
Thing is, VU meters mean nothing anymore– they start out just below peak, and stay there for the whole recording.
Slight reference to The Loudness Warsâ„¢?
Apparently I have to be subtle, or I get down-voted.
… of playing a vinyl album all the way through to find the peak VU levels so you could set the record level correctly on your tape deck to get the perfect recording.
This was only after you’d carefully cleaned the record, balanced the tone-arm, and made sure you were running at exactly 33 1/3 RPM according to the strobe markings.
It’s possible I took this process too seriously– but some of those tapes still sounded brand new 20 years later.
And then came .mp3 with 128k static bitrate, and the loudness wars.
And just to round off the old-man-yells-at-kids cliche, I’ll throw a javelin at the guy who came up with blue/orange color grading, even though it has nothing to do with audio or VU’s.
I didn’t see it as blue/orange, but rather as a dead-air vs. live. Like blue skin on a dead body vs. the flesh tones on anyone reading this. Of course, maybe I’m over-thinking this.
However, I will take exception to that whole, “how quiet and suddenly loud can we be?” mentality that infected Pink Floyd. The smash cuts from sotto-voce lead-ins to fortissimo instrumentals aren’t just startling. They’re actually injurious to people’s hearing! “The Wall” starts with the perfect demonstration: a lilting concertina melody for 15 seconds or so, then a deafening, instantaneous entrance of all the instruments in the band.
My point is this: the dynamic levels of a calm melody & a techno dance-tune should not be wildly different. We don’t need to adapt every 15 minutes or so between near-darkness and suddenly blinding sunlight. But that’s what Roger Waters does to our hearing.
Balance the loud & quiet. Hearing is the sense most often injured. If you’re trying to make a point, you can do it without making me a little more deaf.
… and that’s part of why I’m not a fan of The Wall.
To me the loudness wars did more to ruin music than the bit rate.
People are always trying to find better and better encoders which need less bits, so a high enough bit rate will still sound good if you have the original materials.
But what the loudness wars have given us is distorted sources (CDs, DVDs, and even tapes) so it is hard to get the true original material.
I am not an audio fan, and even I get fed up with listening to my car radio because the sound is so bad. Did you read that, I am the type of guy who is satisfied with the sound of a standard car radio and the distortion has gotten so bad on some songs that even I at 61 with bad hearing can not stand it.
It all starts with the recording engineer. The art of recording has changed drastically over the last several decades and today you’re hard-press to find truly well-crafted recordings because they simple don’t exist, because the newer generation of recording engineers were never taught how to respect & work the audio. They were raised on digital equipment where the engineer is just a button-pusher and algorithms do all the work. And so the art of recording has been vanishing over time.
This is wrong too. That color mapping is a way to visualize the frequency spectrum using the visible light spectrum. It provides a different way to perceive what’s happening, and it’s very useful during processing.
And finally, it makes no sense to mention the color spectrum gradient and vu meters in the same sentence. They’re measure & represent completely different things. Lumping them together like that only shows you don’t know what you’re talking about.
As I said, nothing to do with VU’s, or audio– I’m referring to the tendency for Hollywood to rely excessively on software color-grading as a replacement for good photography and lighting. Purely visual. In a post above, I linked to a blog that shows how much Hollywood has come to rely on this technique.
It’s yet another instance in which a useful technology has become over-used, leading to a decline in quality of media– in this case, visible rather than audible, but in both cases, it’s using computerized tools to replace talent and skill.
There are plenty of knowledgeable, experienced, talented, and skillful people who work solely in the digital realm whether we’re talking audio or video. The art of recording has been lost in the transition from analog to digital. The exact opposite is true for video. Video has vastly improved. That being said, of course anything simply sent through the auto-leveling machine is going to be sub-par.
We’re not communicating.
We’re apparently both using English, but using it in completely different ways. You’re apparently reading not what I wrote, but what you think I wrote, and they aren’t the same thing.
The funny thing is, we mostly agree.