Standardize your monitoring level, part II: mastered loudness vs. mix loudness

Yesterday’s post touched on the idea of using other people’s music to figure out a good listening level for your music work, and I said something that I want to expand on:

1. Open up Spotify, or Apple Music, or whatever other streaming service you subscribe to.

2. Make sure that the “normalize volume” feature is turned off, so that you’re listening to everything at its mastered volume, not the quieter normalized volume.

(A bit of background: the streaming services all offer volume normalization as an option. In a nutshell, this preference offsets songs’ volumes, so that they are all the same target loudness, for a more consistent listening experience across different artists’ recordings. Spotify currently normalizes to -14 LUFS Integrated; Apple is -16; they’re all a bit different.)

If you consider that a mastered song’s loudness is generally somewhere between -8 and -10 LUFS Integrated, you can see that the streaming services are turning the music down a good bit when the normalization preference is activated!

Yesterday, when I suggested turning the normalization feature off before setting your listening volume, that’s because I suggest to people that they mix at mastered loudness. I have learned through my own mixing practice that doing this forces you to grapple with how the fairly intensive limiting that happens in mastering will affect your mix, which results in you being forced to do better EQing and dynamics management.

But I also know that there are people out there who work on their mixes at a quieter volume. Again, to be clear, I don’t recommend this — I believe that you’ll get better results if you work louder. But, to accommodate those people, I want to offer the following amendment to yesterday’s piece:

• If you work at mastering loudness, turn off the volume normalization feature when you’re setting your monitoring loudness …

• … and if you work at a quieter “mixing loudness,” then turn on the normalization feature before setting your monitoring loudness.

This simple little tweak should accommodate people in both camps, and should help set you up with a good listening level for your day-to-day work.

Flexibly — jamie