Is Louder Music Better? The loudness war says yes. What do you say?

Over the past twenty years, music has been getting louder and louder. New recording equipment and software have made it possible to produce extremely compressed audio. But is this really what listeners want? K-Meter offers an alternative by encouraging greater use of dynamic range. If you want your tunes to sound more open, nuanced and natural, this fully-compliant K-System meter is for you.

K-System Metering – What is it?

It’s a way of metering pioneered by Bob Katz, mastering engineer and grammy award winner. With the K-System, maximizing peak levels is no longer the goal; instead, your focus shifts to loudness metering and dynamic range.

The K-System has three scales: K-12, K-14 and K-20. You choose which scale to use based on genre and delivery format. K-12 is for broadcast and radio. K-14 is for mainstream pop, rock and country. K-20 is for film, classical and high-fidelity recordings. From K-12 to K-20, the scales provide an increasing amount of dynamic range.

Calibration Tools: Use pink noise to calibrate your monitors.

K-Meter helps you calibrate your studio monitors by outputting pink noise through each channel. You can use a 3rd party sound pressure meter to ensure proper levels (see the manual for details). Calibrating your monitors makes mixing/mastering by ear even more effective.

Modern Loudness Metering: Perceived loudness with ITU BS.1770.

K-Meter supports loudness metering using ITU BS.1770 (stereo only). This is quickly becoming the international standard for measuring perceived loudness, which takes into account the ear’s sensitivity to different frequencies. Our users love that this powerful feature allows them to take basic loudness measurements at a fraction of the cost of more expensive loudness meters.

True-Peak Metering: What are inter-sample peaks?

In the K-System, peak metering is no longer the focus; however, it is still important to avoid clipping. K-Meter supports true-peak metering, which upsamples your audio up to four times before detecting peaks. This highly accurate detection discovers clipping that other peak meters miss.