DRMeter — The Only Official DR Meter

The MAAT DRMeter is a worthy companion for daily mixing and mastering tasks, enabling fast, accurate and easy mix and mastering decisions. For fine tuning peak excursions, and properly setting your limiter with the fast and responsive peak meter bar, the DRMeter family is unmatched. An “Overs” alert warns you to tweak your limiter in order to prevent unwanted distortion on playback. The adjacent RMS loudness bar graphs have more relaxed or damped ballistics, so you get a good sense of the perceptual loudness. This conveys an awareness of proper level staging without overly hectic meter movement. The green -18dBRMS tick mark indicates 0LU, a widely agreed upon amplitude for hitting your outboard gear’s sweet spot. It also helps to manage gain staging for ITB or In–The–Box workflows. The legendary DR bar graph can be operated as independent channels, or coupled for a summed left/right response. Our DR bar graph visually informs the user through a familiar “traffic light” green/yellow/red color coding scheme. The blue -∞ indicator informs you when your DAW is delivering “digital black” or null AES data. If you’ve inserted some noise generating plug-in or outboard within a project, you’ll instantly see that.
Complementing the new BS.1770 metering standards, including Loudness Range (LRA) which was designed to reflect the macro dynamics of broadband audio with a focus on broadcasting, the importance and spirit of the DR measurement system for music is unbroken. LRA was designed for controlling the perceived loudness range of motion picture soundtracks and television programs. Whereas the DRMeter’s algorithm looks at the loudest 20% of the instantaneous signal, LRA purposefully ignores the top 5% of a track’s dynamic deviation, making it unsuitable for the evaluation of the dynamics of music.

The DRMeter is a plug-in that generates approximate DR values when applied to the loudest passages in a track. Due to realtime operation, it cannot measure official, integrated DRi values, which are cumulative over the entire length of a song. Only the companion DROffline or DROffline MkII batch measuring utilities can scrub through an entire song or track, resulting in an official DR number.

The DR algorithm, an improved version of PLR (Peak–to–Loudness Ratio) or “crest factor,” specifically measures the dynamic density or lack of dynamics caused by overly aggressive dynamic compression and limiting. When the loudest spots of a song are measured, it gives the user an estimate for the "official" DR Value, measured with the companion DROffline. Seeing a meaningful and easy to understand indication of dynamic range inspires users to back away from hyper compression. The complete DR metering systems, composed of the realtime DRMeter or DRMeter MkII plus the DROffline or DROfflne MkII batch processors, was created by Friedemann Tischmeyer to address the need to generate a repeatable, easy to understand numeric value. In response to the broadly publicized “Loudness Wars,” the PMF worked to raise awareness that oppressively compressed dynamics in pop music are not only counterproductive, but sound often like crap! Now legendary, the PMF’s TT DR Meter and its offline companion was created to provide a deterministic benchmark, and was used by thousands of engineers and tens of thousands of consumers to measure and log the dynamic range of popular music releases around the world. Alas, as with all things digital, the TT DR Meter grew old. An update was needed and MAAT’s DRMeter was born.