Linear Acoustic announced that it has begun shipping its new LQ-1 Loudness Meter to dealers and customers this week.

Designed for simplicity and accuracy, the LQ-1 supports ITU-R BS.1770 loudness metering standards and includes selectable Dolby® Dialogue Intelligence™ automatic gating. The resulting metered value agrees with standards and recommended practices such as ATSC A/85 and EBU R128 and accurately reflects listener perception.

Input and output signal levels are clearly displayed alongside measured loudness and dialnorm metadata, giving instant verification of loudness compliance.

Audio can be extracted from any pair of an applied HD/SD-SDI signal, from the AES, TOSLINK™ optical, or balanced analogue inputs. The unit also supports DVB-ASI and can extract a selected PID from an applied MPEG transport stream for decoding and measurement.

A selectable LtRt or LoRo downmixed output is available from AES and analogue balanced outputs and via the front panel headphone connector following decoding and metering. Metadata emulation and Associated Dialogue (AD or Visual Descriptive) mixing can also be auditioned on the downmixed output.

"The list of 'must haves' for this meter was long," says Linear Acoustic Vice President and Executive Director Christina Carroll. "It had to be easy to use, flexible and accurate. It had to be small enough for tight edit bays, and tough enough to use in an OB truck. Plus it had to be affordable. That's a lot to ask of one little meter, but the LQ-1 does all of that and more."

Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, and Dolby E decoding are standard along with GPI/O support for alarms and control. Options include an external redundant power supply and SNMP for system monitoring or logging via Ethernet.

The LQ-1 will be on display with other Linear Acoustic products including the brand-new AERO.2000™ Audio/Loudness Manager at NAB 2013 in Booth N3438.