The industry agrees: Louder isnt better. Standardized levels are needed in games. Now, how do we make this happen? By borrowing best practices from other industries (particularly broadcast and film) where guidelines and recommendations are already established, experts will detail how to move this prominent issue forward. This panel brings together experts throughout the value chain (including content developers, lab/researchers, and hardware manufacturers) to debate practices and generate next steps for the industry. Join them as they introduce the idea of speech measurement with a fixed reference point for games. Discussion will include strides already made in broadcast, following research (by AES) demonstrating that people agree more with each other (within one decibel) when assessing the level of content that primarily contains speech against a reference.

Moving beyond procedures needed for game production to hardware, panelists will discuss Microsofts next-generation compression format X-Audio and upcoming design advancements for future consoles.