Dialog Norm Levels for Music Blu-rays

[tlake6659]

Can anyone post some dialog norm levels for music Blu-rays that are not set at -31db.

Example

Frank Zappa - Waka -26
Frank Zappa - Grand Wazoo -18

Can any forum members post any others.

Thanks

 

[sjcorne]

Richard Wright - Wet Dream -26
Blur - The Ballad Of Darren -18
Rush - Signals -23
Kiss - Creatures Of The Night -18

 

[dabl]

Interesting, I didn't realize this issue extended to lossless files as I never thought to check them.

I remember somebody from the Zappa camp (possibly Joe Travers) addressing the low volume complaints for that title and basically saying it was something out of their control.

It's amazing to me the lack of fundamental understanding out there in the professional world about this issue and the number of released titles where this was missed.

I'm *not* saying these guys are stupid as they're clearly not, but they somehow missed this important detail in checking the final encoding of their product. In the end, the audio or mastering engineer has to be responsible for checking it.

This kind of ties in with what Elliot Scheiner was saying about Atmos with regard to it being something developed for movie sound, not music.

Dialnorm is something appropriate for movie sound but not music.

 

[DuncanS]

Makes me wonder why Dolby doesn't have a set-up button for Atmos for music and another for Atmos for films/movies

 

[tlake6659]

Richard Wright - Wet Dream -26
Blur - The Ballad Of Darren -18
Rush - Signals -23
Kiss - Creatures Of The Night -18

Thanks, any other Steven Wilson Atmos mixes that have a different dialog norm than -31?

 

[sjcorne]

Thanks, any other Steven Wilson Atmos mixes that have a different dialog norm than -31?

Not that I’m aware of.

 

[SomethingAnything]

Apologies, but I'm not quite sure what this is about? But it sounds interesting. Are you talking about how the menu music can be at a very different default level to the music when you play it?

 

[steelydave]

Apologies, but I'm not quite sure what this is about? But it sounds interesting. Are you talking about how the menu music can be at a very different default level to the music when you play it?

DialNorm is a parameter in the metadata of Dolby streams (both Dolby Digital and TrueHD) that tells the amp to adjust the volume by a certain number of dB. The thinking (in simple terms) is that if you set your amp to a certain volume, anything you play back should come out of your speakers at roughly the same level. But we know that mixing engineers all work in different ways, so the end product can vary from mix to mix, from a volume perspective.

DialNorm allows the mastering engineer (who gets the files after the mix engineer exports them) to use some fancy shmancy tools (and their golden ears) to calculate the overall "loudness" of the content, and then set the DialNorm parameter appropriately. Because exporting and encoding DD+/TrueHD Atmos is a more convoluted and time-consuming process than exporting or working with a standard PCM mix, DialNorm makes doing volume adjustments a lot more easy. Let's say for example that the mastering engineer came to the conclusion that the Atmos mix he was mastering was 3dB over the acceptable loudness limit - if DialNorm didn't exist, he'd have to send it back to the mix engineer and ask him to lower the volume by 3dB and re-export it. With DialNorm, the mastering engineer just takes the file he already has and adjusts the DialNorm parameter (-31dB is no change, so -28dB would give you the 3dB reduction) and it's done.

So taking that into account, you can see some of those mixes listed above that have a -18dB DialNorm value come out of your amp much quieter than the ones that have the -31dB value - 13dB to be exact. So you end up having to turn your volume control up to counteract this reduction - to me it's a stupid and unnecessary system for music.

At least on physical media all the songs on an album have the same DialNorm value - on streaming releases, it seems like often when a leadoff single (or singles) precede the release of the entire album, the singles have a different value than the rest of the tracks. There are some albums I like where I have to constantly ride the volume control because of these values, the worst of which are sometimes 12-15dB apart, and to me this seems like the polar opposite of what automated volume adjustment metadata should do - it should be making it (like ReplayGain does perfectly for FLAC and mp3) so that you never have to touch the volume control from song to song or album to album.

There are some AVRs that allow you to defeat DialNorm, but they're few and far between and there often isn't information about whether they do or not unless you get into the guts of the configuration menus. The bigger question is, when will we get software tools (like eac3to or mkvtoolnix) that allow us to strip DialNorm data (or set it as we wish) and/or software support in Kodi, JRiver, VLC, and other media players for disabling DialNorm? I'm sure eventually some bright spark will tackle it, but at the moment it's kind of a 'wince and bear it' situation.

 

[SomethingAnything]

DialNorm is a parameter in the metadata of Dolby streams (both Dolby Digital and TrueHD) that tells the amp to adjust the volume by a certain number of dB. The thinking (in simple terms) is that if you set your amp to a certain volume, anything you play back should come out of your speakers at roughly the same level. But we know that mixing engineers all work in different ways, so the end product can vary from mix to mix, from a volume perspective.

DialNorm allows the mastering engineer (who gets the files after the mix engineer exports them) to use some fancy shmancy tools (and their golden ears) to calculate the overall "loudness" of the content, and then set the DialNorm parameter appropriately. Because exporting and encoding DD+/TrueHD Atmos is a more convoluted and time-consuming process than exporting or working with a standard PCM mix, DialNorm makes doing volume adjustments a lot more easy. Let's say for example that the mastering engineer came to the conclusion that the Atmos mix he was mastering was 3dB over the acceptable loudness limit - if DialNorm didn't exist, he'd have to send it back to the mix engineer and ask him to lower the volume by 3dB and re-export it. With DialNorm, the mastering engineer just takes the file he already has and adjusts the DialNorm parameter (-31dB is no change, so -28dB would give you the 3dB reduction) and it's done.

So taking that into account, you can see some of those mixes listed above that have a -18dB DialNorm value come out of your amp much quieter than the ones that have the -31dB value - 13dB to be exact. So you end up having to turn your volume control up to counteract this reduction - to me it's a stupid and unnecessary system for music.

At least on physical media all the songs on an album have the same DialNorm value - on streaming releases, it seems like often when a leadoff single (or singles) precede the release of the entire album, the singles have a different value than the rest of the tracks. There are some albums I like where I have to constantly ride the volume control because of these values, the worst of which are sometimes 12-15dB apart, and to me this seems like the polar opposite of what automated volume adjustment metadata should do - it should be making it (like ReplayGain does perfectly for FLAC and mp3) so that you never have to touch the volume control from song to song or album to album.

There are some AVRs that allow you to defeat DialNorm, but they're few and far between and there often isn't information about whether they do or not unless you get into the guts of the configuration menus. The bigger question is, when will we get software tools (like eac3to or mkvtoolnix) that allow us to strip DialNorm data (or set it as we wish) and/or software support in Kodi, JRiver, VLC, and other media players for disabling DialNorm? I'm sure eventually some bright spark will tackle it, but at the moment it's kind of a 'wince and bear it' situation.

Thanks!

 

[dabl]

There are some AVRs that allow you to defeat DialNorm, but they're few and far between and there often isn't information about whether they do or not unless you get into the guts of the configuration menus. The bigger question is, when will we get software tools (like eac3to or mkvtoolnix) that allow us to strip DialNorm data (or set it as we wish) and/or software support in Kodi, JRiver, VLC, and other media players for disabling DialNorm? I'm sure eventually some bright spark will tackle it, but at the moment it's kind of a 'wince and bear it' situation.

Interesting, I didn't know about the useful features of DialNorm for mastering purposes. It does seem like a setting in the encoder which should be defaulted to off or -31dB and a help/info button saying 'only change this if you know what you're doing'.

I believe most Denon/Marantz AVRs can disable DialNorm temporarily. The mechanism to do it is only available when a track is playing and then reverts back to being enabled, making it necessary to disable it for each track while it's playing, which of course is useless. I have the recipe written down somewhere if anybody cares. But the fact that it can be done at all means in theory that feature could be implemented to not be temporary. If anybody knows of an AVR that has a 'sticky' DialNorm defeat I'd be all ears.

Software DialNorm management could be attacked in the same fashion used for ReplayGain functionality, where metadata is read for each track and then and then acted on by the player. In the case of ReplayGain, the files need to be scanned for an overall volume measurement and that metadata then written back into them first. The player then needs to 'know' about this added metadata. The good news for the atmos files is the metadata is already there. But first a developer needs to care enough about this to investigate tackling it. Really the motivation should be the same as with ReplayGain. It's pretty easy to demonstrate grossly varying volumes between tracks and understand why that would be a good problem to solve. The ReplayGain idea was developed elegantly to accommodate maintaining relative volume decisions made by the mastering engineer for tracks within an album and also trying to handle playlists with tracks from many different albums.

A tool like MediaInfo can show DialNorm values along with a ton of other info about almost any media file. Note that you may need to use
'Debug, Advanced' and 'View, Text' to see them. I know at one point DialNorm values weren't displayed by default in most views.

 

[barfle]

Wow, this is strange stuff. So I’m looking for education here.

When I make an audio file (pretty much always FLAC), I record in 24 bits, avoiding clipping by keeping the volume “reasonable.” Once I’ve played with it all I want to, I use Goldwave’s “maximize volume” function, which scans the file and tells me what the loudest peak in the file is. I usually adjust the level so the peak is 0.5db below clipping, then store the file as 16 bits and I’m done.

I’m guessing this discussion has to do with the Atmos metadata that extracts the objects from the bed. Having zero experience with Atmos (although I’m looking at Atmos-capable pre-pros), that’s just a guess on my part. I may be wildly off.

 

[himey]

At least on physical media all the songs on an album have the same DialNorm value - on streaming releases, it seems like often when a leadoff single (or singles) precede the release of the entire album, the singles have a different value than the rest of the tracks.

Sadly, not only is it an issue with the released singles, but the issue also goes way beyond that. Good to know it isn't an issue with Blu-ray and yet another reason to get the physical release. Gravity Stairs streaming version has "DN" issues throughout.

 

[tlake6659]

What about Who's Next? Volume seems to be low compared to other Atmos mixes.

 

[dabl]

What about Who's Next? Volume seems to be low compared to other Atmos mixes.

I took a quick look at the 2 main content .m2ts files from the blu-ray and they're the correct expected -31dB for what that's worth.

Obviously Steven doesn't use overall mix bus compression techniques like some, and mandates his mixes get released 'as is' with no further mastering so the overall volume here compared to something done by say, Michael Brauer, might just be a reflection of that.

I noticed MediaInfo doesn't seem to obviously display Dialog Normalization values for the converted .mka files unless I'm missing something. Not sure what's up with that.