For decades, many commercial radio programmers believed that to win the ratings war, you had to be the loudest signal on the dial. However, audio expert Paul Kriegler told the Western Association of Broadcast Engineers (WABE) Media and Entertainment Technology Conference in Vancouver that outdated belief is actively alienating radio audiences as connected dashboards and digital streaming reshape the listening experience.

Kriegler, Senior Director of Audio Processing at Telos Alliance, told attendees during his presentation, “Make Your Station Sound Its Best in the Digital Dash,” that in a digital era defined by connected dashboards, software normalization, and high-fidelity streaming, that the traditional “loudness war” is a complete myth that sacrifices listener retention.

The industry veteran recalled an engineering trip to the top of the Empire State Building in New York City. Hired by a major market station to investigate why listeners were losing their HD Radio signal, Kriegler uncovered a jaw-dropping culprit: the station’s program director had quietly cranked the composite output of their audio processor to 137% modulation directly from his phone.

The hyper-compressed analog signal was so grossly over-modulated that its sidebands were physically blotting out the station’s own HD digital broadcast.

“The engineer turns to me and says, ‘Maybe this is why listeners can’t pick up our HD signal as well,'” Kriegler recalled. “You’re onto something.”

Yet, as Kriegler experienced firsthand moments later in a rental car equipped with a modern digital dashboard, the car’s internal software levelled out the volume between stations automatically.

“PDs are always going to want to make it louder,” Kriegler said. “The radio itself is acting as another clipper, creating more distortion in the car cabin. Over-modulation doesn’t work anymore. It just doesn’t.”

Excessive loudness repels women listeners

Kriegler noted that when an audio processor squeezes dynamic range out of a broadcast, it eliminates what he calls the essential “air between the peaks.”

Without those natural breathing spaces in sound, human ears experience immediate, subconscious annoyance – a phenomenon that internal broadcast research shows impacts women more acutely.

“It’s not always about being the loudest station on the dial – it’s about the air between the peaks on your radio station,” Kriegler emphasized. “If there’s no air between the peaks, you’re going to annoy your audience, especially females.”

Referencing focus group and audience testing conducted by media organizations like Cox, Kriegler explained that while listeners rarely complain about codec compression or minor audio quirks, severe high-frequency clipping and dense distortion are an immediate trigger to change the station.

“If I were to have done this whole presentation screaming at you at one volume, you’re going to leave,” Kriegler told attendees. “If something is subconsciously annoying you, a listener won’t necessarily point out, ‘Oh, that’s a noise.’ They won’t even tell you they stopped listening because they can’t pick up the signal. They’ll just pick another station.”

He pointed to a legacy country station in his home market that fell from its multi-decade position as the market’s number-one station to barely pulling a single share point after a program director pushed their audio processing to 10.5 dB of aggressive loudness.

“Time spent listening is gold,” Kriegler warned. “I can spend all the money on audience research and billboards, but it just takes hiring the wrong program director who doesn’t know when something is loud enough to drive away an audience.”

To prevent listener fatigue and protect stream fidelity, Kriegler urged broadcasters to ditch old processing “tricks” and adopt modern audio discipline, including normalizing music databases prior to automation playback to prevent sudden level spikes; matching digital stream targets to normalized industry standards; and using next-generation processing, which employs Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) clipping to dramatically reduce intermodulation distortion (IMD).

“We have an option today to turn dials down,” Kriegler urged. “As broadcasters, we need to be real cognizant of quality, especially given the sheer number of listening choices available to our audience today.”