Pleasurize Music Foundation, The most credible dynamic range advocacy group so far? Options

[Axon]

http://www.dynamicrange.de/

This looks pretty good. They have lots of industry contacts, Algorithmix is involved with a professional-looking dynamic range meter (it appears to be a variant of Chromatix's technique, actually), which is already released. They aren't focusing on visual waveform plots (yay) and are instead focusing on industry interaction.

[Raiden]

Version 1.2 is up. The offline tool is still the same, though. And they have not fixed the English manual. They should release the source for the algorithm.

It also overestimates the loudness of low frequency content, which is a good move for being hard on modern hypercompressed masterings, but is harder to defend on psychoacoustic grounds.

Isn't the exact opposite the case? The current algorithm will assign a lower DR value to a recording with more bass. This is bad behaviour as bass is the first thing that suffers from hypercompression. An example: SND's first album (RG of -0.59 dB and very dynamic) is just a DR7!

[Axon]

Version 1.2 is up. The offline tool is still the same, though. And they have not fixed the English manual. They should release the source for the algorithm.

It also overestimates the loudness of low frequency content, which is a good move for being hard on modern hypercompressed masterings, but is harder to defend on psychoacoustic grounds.

Isn't the exact opposite the case? The current algorithm will assign a lower DR value to a recording with more bass. This is bad behaviour as bass is the first thing that suffers from hypercompression. An example: SND's first album (RG of -0.59 dB and very dynamic) is just a DR7!

Right, that's exactly what I'm saying - but on top of that, that is not accurate. The reason bass suffers after aggressive mastering techniques is because it is simply not as audible as other frequencies. The overall loudness of the track simply does not change all that much from simple removal of bass. As an eq choice it tends to coincide with hypercompression, but the lack of a direct correlation between the two means that this bass overemphasis slightly distorts the meaning of DR comparisons across different mastering styles and music genres.

For instance, this means that compression differences in classical music (with very little bass) might make a less substantial DR change than with rock music; even if a classical piece is hypercompressed, the lack of effect on the bass signal means that the same amount of compression does not go as far with manipulating the DR figure.