Broadcast Loudness Normalization Without Tears: Getting BS.1770-4 Right Across a Multi-Station Deployment
By the KAVANA engineering team — June 2026
Loudness normalization is one of those broadcast topics where the theory is well-documented and the practice is genuinely hard. The standards exist — BS.1770-4, EBU R 128, ATSC A/85, and a collection of national variants — and they are reasonably clear about what they require. The problem is that implementing them consistently across a multi-station deployment, with heterogeneous source material, multiple content production pipelines, and varying monitoring infrastructure, requires engineering decisions that the standards do not make for you.
We have been implementing loudness normalization across our station customer base for the better part of a decade. This post is an honest account of what works, what does not, where the standards genuinely conflict with each other, and what we built to address the parts that existing commercial tools handle poorly.
Why the Standards Do Not Simply Solve the Problem
