Sound Magic Releases Neo Loudness – ‘The Ultimate Weapon For The Loudness War’

Sound Magic has introduced Neo Loudness – a comprehensive tool designed to control loudness. Neo Loudness not only includes traditional compressors and limiters, but it also features a new type of Maximizer.

The Sound Magic Neo Loudness algorithm is based on psychological acoustics, the science that shows how human ears are less sensitive to loudness when it reaches certain ranges. Neo Loudness uses this area to compress the audio signal. When using traditional limiters – and under heavy limiting – music can sound very tight and breathless. The main instruments will sound like they are being pushed way forward. With Neo Loudness, the overall result is a more natural sound while the imaging of the instruments is hardly changed.

With heavy limiting and clipping, a traditional limiter can also generate more odd harmonic distortion than even harmonic distortion. Overall, Neo Loudness tends to generate less harmonic distortion altogether and the harmonics that are generated tend to be the even ones, giving a warmer and more natural sound.

Features:

  • Internal 64-bit floating point precision
  • Comprehensive Loudness/Dynamic Processer features Compressors, Limiters and 2 innovative Maximizers.
  • Included 3 compressors and 2 limiters
  • Meticulous envelope controls on 4 parameters (compared with others with only 2 or 3 controls) including Attack, Hold, Release and RMS length, give users the maximum control of the final sound.
  • Innovative Neo Loudness technology results in a more natural and high quality sound during loudness processing.
  • Powerful Add-on system makes it easier to add new compressors/limiters (Famous Maker) sounds in the future.
  • Accurate Modeling by Sound Magic Award Winning Modeling Technology.
  • Meticulous Metering system gives the users “the next step” in accurate monitoring.
  • Different plug-in version to fit for usage on M/S, Sidechain, Mono and Surround
  • Up to 32Bit/384KHz resolution

Neo Loudness is provided as a Windows VST or Add-on for Supreme Piano 2. For more information or a demo, see the Sound Magic site.

18 thoughts on “Sound Magic Releases Neo Loudness – ‘The Ultimate Weapon For The Loudness War’

  1. Damn, really?
    What happend to people making quality mixes from the beginning? Red lights don’t mean the sound is “awesome”. In digital, overload is always bad, one red light and you have square waves destroying the drivers trying to reproduce the crap being fed to them. Not only that the square waves created by bad recordings are helping us make our audience go def. Simple math to make your recordings and mixes better is -18dBfs (full scale) generally equal to 0dBvu (volume unites) digital is measured in full scale and analog is measured in volume units. If you record good signal and mix to an appropriate level, then when in the mastering process you will end up with this useable space called “headroom”. Why then do we try to effectively slam our noise floor into our headroom and try to justify it as a good mix? IMHO loudness wars make all music that participates, suck. And the people who use products like this should be dragged into the streets and exposed as the uneducated musicians that they are. Compressors are not that hard to use, they have a simple theory behind them, Eq’s are the same. Read a book about recording and mixing, it would be a much better investment than this piece of junk

  2. Oh I do, I have read many a white paper on FPS.(I have a BAS in audio science and technology, I work in a REAL studio as a recording and mix engineer/producer, and I’v gone to every AES meeting in my local chapter and every AES convention for 10+ years I think I’m educated…) But FPS doesn’t make shitty sounding music sound any better. it’s not raising the headroom, or making more space for information, people are still recording at 48bit & 24bit. And all these products are aimed at people who have zero critical listening skills. You want tape compression? Bounce your mix off of TAPE! You can get a 1/4 reel to reel for the price of a decent hard drive on craigslist. Loudness wars is bullshit, because it’s drivin for radio play and if you know anything about radio, they have to fit their broadcast into such a small space in the radio frequency bandwidth, that they have to compress you mix to a point of trashing it anyway (remember the “radio mix”?) In the club, on your iPod, or in your car, these slammed out levels do nothing to make your music better, it’s about Quality not Quantity. How about stop hiding the fact that you could be a shitty musician with a lower skill set than others by pretending you know how your mix will translate from protools, logic, live, or reason through your worlds shittyist consumer level “monitors”, to your audience’s listening environment. Really if you want a good mix, do it on the same output gear they are using, like your iPod headphones. Didn’t they teach you that at Fullsale* or where ever you got your education. Big studios for consumer music is done, and the average home musician can’t afford to recreate those listening environments at home, but that being said every mix I do (I mix on an SSL 9000e/g) I give the mix atleast 2 or 3 passes through the kind of speakers the people who buy my mixes listen to. But I guess using and learning about real gear is intimidating to your ego, so go on and keep making skinny beats Reason, and trolling it out on the Internet…

    1. @2326: shame on you!
      I really feel offended by this load of BS. It is absolutely great that you are proud of your expertise on sound-sculpting – good for you, we can not get enough of the good old aproach. Having said that, there is no pride in not embracing some of the new mindsets about creating music – in the end of the day it is all about if the people you are working with/for are happy with the end result, 24-track Studer reel-to-reel or not SSL or Pro Tools or whatever. Right now I am listening to ABBA’s Super Trouper album (1980), which I find is the best mixing effort I have ever listened to, it really does’nt make a difference to me that it’s 100+ tracks (per song) was recorded on reel-to-reel and mixed on a Neve desk – I just LOOOOVE the way it sounds, and from what I hear: YES it would be possible to create THAT sound on a DAW. It pretty much comes down to the skills of the peole involved -and yes especially the engineer. Off course we can’t all be a Michael B. Tretow (engineer)

  3. uuuu I hear lots of anger in the air…
    but I must admit that as many other people I’m quite bored and annoyed by the absence of dynamics in certain contemporary music.
    Probably we wouldn’t have had a loudness war if everybody listened to music with a decent hi-fi. but yeah there’s the radio and those bloody ipods with those incredibly lousy earplugs.

    1. the death of the consumer hi-fi is a big part of the problem….. mp3’s and the crappy earplugs are a big part of the problem… DJ’s who need to hammer music into people’s ears in the least suitable acoustic spaces are a big part of the problem

  4. I agree with the complaints. But the fact is loudness sells and its a proven fact by the millions major labels have made of it.

    1. yep, shit tastes good, billions of flies can’t be wrong! 😀

      Then we agree that the business model behind music is wrong. Though it’s probably not worth arguing about, since the market is currently imploding. Soon there will be no market for music anymore, and the whole loudness thing will be a thing of the past!
      Well I’m exaggerating a bit of course, but the times we live in really are kind of the end of an era I think, the loudness war getting to its climax could mean that it’s just the desperate attempt of dying system to still stay alive.

  5. 🙂
    I agree with 2326.
    Just make your music good so the mastering is just like a sauce that ‘s on top of it.
    I’m not a digital lover also!
    I prefer a nice vinyl record over a stupid mp3 or wav file.
    But hey,I have seen a lot of producers that works with reason and they take channels into red (clipping) and they say that it works for them.(Claude Von Stroke etc…)
    They say that you have to use the program in the hottest way and that it works that way for them.
    I’ve seen another producer (that makes money with it) doing the same shit(clipping tracks) with logic.
    I know with hardware it can give you in some cases nice saturation effects.
    But yes,it works for those guy’s so…….what can we say?

  6. This is ridiculous. This is a product that is essentially a compressor suite, claiming to do a better job at retaining perceived clarity and dynamics than traditional compressors, and half this thread is having a go because they see the term ‘loudness wars’ and work up some irrelevant ire about how it’s ‘killing’ music.
    Maybe I’m on the wrong page here, but isn’t the retention of clarity and dynamics a GOOD thing?
    There’s no mathematical formula or secret technique for putting together a good mix, and just because somebody might dare to see the utility in a product like this does not make them ‘uneducated’.

  7. These products are around to take away dynamics, not add to them. The name of the product it’s self is half of its problem. They claim to produce a more pleasing harmonic distortion, just like MaxBass by Digidesign, it’s a crap product for crap musicians that don’t know what they are doing, adding to the problem. What I have been advocating in this thread is EDUCATION! Nothing is ever going to make things better with out it. Selling a plugin like this is like giving the end user (my non musical mother) eq controls for the radio in the car, they shouldnt have that control, otherwise why master at all? If there is nothing to work with in the final phase of mixing you end up with unlistenable crap. I think you are missing the point. I bet you add dither in the middle of a mix because some dumbass told you it would clean up your signals, well, dither is the final step of MASTERING because just disappears when anything digital is done after, its for filling the step holes between bits effectively adding noise to the digital signal. Just like dither, a mastering compressor/limiter suite like this should be second to last in your mix (right before dither) and if that’s the case what do you as a musician need this for? This is a Mastering product named “loudness” and you want to say this is an irrelevant conversation? These products are like acid pro 15 years ago, directed at people who don’t know what they are doing trying to give the user a false sense of security in a lack of education, letting them believe that even though they aren’t sure why they are using it, the fine people at sound magic will have the solution. READ a BOOK about using gear and audio processing and you could achieve the same results and the book is a whole lot cheaper. More is not better

    1. “These products are around to take away dynamics, not add to them.”
      Believe it or not, I am quite aware of this. The trick is in the term ‘compressor’. My point is that if db for db, this particular compressor gives a perceptibly less coloured signal than a traditional model, then its usefulness is self-evident. If a particular engineer wishes to use it to redline a mix so hard that it becomes unpleasant, that’s the fault of the engineer.

      “They claim to produce a more pleasing harmonic distortion, just like MaxBass by Digidesign, it’s a crap product for crap musicians that don’t know what they are doing”
      I can’t find any such product as “Digidesign MaxBass” so I will assume you are referring to Waves MaxxBass. For reference, MaxxBass does not introduce harmonic distortion, but works on psychoacoustic principles, producing harmonics further up the spectrum that fool the ear into perceiving more bass than is actually present. Used correctly, this can be incredibly useful for retaining headroom in a mix.

      “Selling a plugin like this is like giving the end user (my non musical mother) eq controls for the radio in the car, they shouldnt have that control”
      That’s a pretty poor example, but quite honestly, if your mother finds a certain EQ setting to be more pleasing, then why should she not have the means to do that? Music is, has, and always will be an incredibly subjective thing. Likewise, if people want loud, slammed mixes that have been robbed of dynamic, then let them. You can’t just say that they’re ‘uneducated’ because academia will never factor into people’s tastes.

      “I think you are missing the point. I bet you add dither in the middle of a mix because some dumbass told you it would clean up your signals”
      No, I don’t. Why on earth would I do that? And no, I’m not missing the point. I’m merely playing Devil’s Advocate in a discussion that is unfortunately plagued with snobbish conjecture about a product that nobody has even heard yet.

      “Just like dither, a mastering compressor/limiter suite like this should be second to last in your mix (right before dither) and if that’s the case what do you as a musician need this for?”
      Because getting your levels correct should never be a mastering engineer’s job in the first place. That’s the job of whoever is mixing, who more often than not nowadays, is the musician. NeoLoudness is not even billed as a ‘mastering’ product at all, rightly so. Sure, there are many features on it that would lend themselves well to mastering, such as M/S configurations, but the fact that these are present would surely go against your claim that it’s just a product for ‘people who don’t know what they’re doing’.

      And as a footnote, please do not assume that because I disagree with you on this matter that I am uneducated. But I will say this – Reading a book is in all honesty not going to get you very far. The best education you can get is the one behind a console, and the opinions of your peers and listeners. Technical know-how is a secondary.

  8. Nice one Seamus! I’m a musician and I admit I suck when it comes to getting compression right, though I’d rather spend 20 more years flailing than buy something like this. But then again I no longer sell any records to speak of, so I can afford to continue down the path I’ve chosen! But I’ve got one friend in particular who is selling lots of tracks tailor made for the sort of dynamically handicapped clubs that perpetuate the Loudness Wars…he sells lots of this stuff and he shoves those mixes up to 11 without hesitation (or irony) and will probably love a plugin like this. Did I mention he’s actually making money?? It’s crazy, it may be wrong, but he’s the professional musician because people send him checks and I’m the fucking loser living g off nostalgia and complaining about today’s damn kids lol

  9. Oh and I made an EP under Young Circle “Vive les enfants d’amour” (still on iTunes ha) in 2003 using ONLY Acid, fuck I wish I’d known how lame I was lol that thing made me some money, thanks ABC. Remember kids, make shit happen however you can, and for gods sake quit taking dither

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