BBC director of television Danny Cohen has welcomed the UK’s new common technical standard for audio.
In a keynote speech at the BBC Academy, Cohen said the standard, published last year by the Digital Production Partnership and based on the EBU’s Loudness recommendation R 128 would solve broadcasters’ loudness issues.
Cohen that the BBC and other broadcasters must pay more attention to the comments and complaints of the audience when it came to issues of sound.” The installation of new meters to replace the now obsolete PPM (peak programme meter), and the retraining of technical and creative operators so that they could use them effectively, would be required for this “major paradigm shift to loudness mixing.”
New television sets coming to market could allow consumers to make their own mix of sound levels, enhancing speech, of benefit to viewers who were hard of hearing and find it difficult to hear speech against background music.