A word on LUFS

🚨 Nerd alert! 🤓

You know how the overall loudness of songs is measured these days in LUFS (integrated)? Here’s something good to know about that.

Because LUFS (integrated) is an average of LUFS (momentary) over the course of the entire song, there can arise a situation with songs that have an extended section without drums where the LUFS (I) measurement falls below the window of LUFS ranges that you might be targeting for the project you’re working on. 

For example, Shannon and I recently had a song we were working on for a composition project. It had an extended intro before the drums come in, and so its LUFS (I) came in at -10.3. But if you were to listen to it, perceptually it was just as loud as some other songs in the project that have drums that are in for basically the entire song. And those songs had a LUFS (I) that's fully 2dB louder, at -8.3!

Basically the takeaway is that LUFS (I), while extremely helpful, is not always the best at facilitating an apples-to-apples comparison of different arrangement approaches in the same style, or different types of songs in a collection (for example, an album with some full-on songs and some gentler songs).

Given this, what I think is most important is to make sure that what we're delivering is consistent perceptually across the body of work. The numbers are helpful — but they don’t tell the whole story.

Always using our ears — jamie