Consumer-grade HDR and the great YouTube audio reckoning

[Michael Tiemann]

We all know that aside from the lucky few who have real HDR UHD monitors (such as the FSI XM310K), most people who are viewing HDR content are doing so on consumer-grade TVs. And most of them--as content consumers, not content creators--are not seeing calibrated video and audio coming out of some reference studio setup, but from a streaming platform such as Netflix. We all know how "loud" one must make the Netflix channel to provide decent levels of audio in our living rooms. Not so YouTube, which seems to deliver much louder normalized audio levels than Netflix--something like +10dB louder (-14 LUFS vs. -24 LUFS).

What, if anything, is in the works so that the volume knob of an LG B7 or C7 OLED TV doesn't need massive renormalization when switching channels from YouTube to Netflix? Is there a similar problem on phone-based platforms, or it is unique to the TV world?

 

[Marc Wielage]

What, if anything, is in the works so that the volume knob of an LG B7 or C7 OLED TV doesn't need massive renormalization when switching channels from YouTube to Netflix? Is there a similar problem on phone-based platforms, or it is unique to the TV world?

Amazon, Netflix, Apple TV, and CBS All-Access each have different audio levels. Who's responsible? Nobody. Industry standards exist, but nobody obeys them. There are also wide variations in dynamic range: Tenet will blow you out of the room (not in a good way) because of the way it's mixed.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

To expand on Marc's note:

Recently watched Tenet in 4K from the UltraHD HDR Blu-Ray disc. In order to get the dialog loud enough to understand, I had to turn up the volume about 8dB higher than typical for other titles in that format. Not surprisingly, at that gain level, the battle scenes were so loud that after the movie was over my family wondered if we had blown out the speakers. Thankfully they're fine, not so sure about the family... ;-)

Cheers - #19