You may have noticed a trend in the in the audio industry that has been dubbed “the loudness war.” In fact, it would be hard to miss it! Today the engineering process is driven hard to produce a product that is as loud as is technically possible within the constraints of the medium. Not surprisingly, a debate is raging as to whether this actually degrades and distorts the audio. One reason for this distortion is the presence of “inter-sample peaks,” where signals that are missed by DAW meters may actually exceed 0dBfs in reconstruction from digital back to the analog in certain digital-to-analog converters. No matter what side of this you happen to be on personally, most audio pros see their job as pleasing the customer, so if the client wants loud, he or she gets it. To facilitate the process, SSL has developed X-ISM, a state of the art VST/AU plug-in that can interpret inter-sample peaks, allowing engineers to make informed judgments about the sound quality of the mix. The plug-in is available in VST, AU, and RTAS formats, making it compatible with virtually all audio software currently available on both PC and Mac. The best part? It’s free to registered SSL users!
