Lufs

i think everyone knows this already and mastering engineers choose loudness to sound good for the songs and not for spotify/yt/etc. data.
and yes the loudness war ain‘t over. it just got accepted as is and thanks to metallica‘s death magnetic everyone realized that too much is really too much. thanks metallica!

Yeah I dug pretty deep into this Lufs charade a few years back really trying to understand it in depth. Have tried same mixes with both the -14lufs and full blast on spotify and came to the same conclusion as this dude. I have actually discarded the whole idea of lufs completely. It does not seem to make any difference as I see it, really frustrating actually. Load up your master as loud as it is and it will play just great. Anything at -14lufs will just sound weak on any streaming service have been my experience. I call bs on the whole thing to be honest, wasted too many hours of my life I will never get back trying to make sense of it.

I suppose they are similar to some extent, but then again not, as I understand it rms is average voltage measured under a very short period while lufs is perceived loudness over the entire song. This makes in my mind rms closer to true peak, but with a short delay so to speak. I read rms measures around 300ms. So if you follow both meters during a mix, I'm not sure if they will correlate that much. 

I understand the aim of the lufs limitation to retain dynamics that loudness wars have in many cases ruined. But then again, a lot of what I listen to is dynamic enough and still plays loud as heck. So it doesn’t really correlate in real world. If a rule might only work if all music is normalized and everyone has to adjust to that we have set an even wider dogmatic rule and limitation to music production than loudness war. Music industry goes communism 🤣. In real life this would only work if we go back to vinyl and cd only, where we adjust our listening per album. As long as there is a button to turn normalization off and even one streaming platform decides to rogue from the -14 lufs dictated norm, the norm turns useless. I don’t remember ever hearing an album on spotify with normalization off that would be mastered to -14. So whom is this ruled actually aimed to?

I showed the results of a Chris Stapleton song from the album vs the streaming version on YouTube a couple years ago. It was the same mix and master but the YT version was turned down by about -3db if I remember correctly.

And Chris is not even that loud! His records are some of the few hifi popular music productions out there now. Most everything else is ruined by the limiters and sounds pumpy or crappy on monitors or larger speaker systems dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=chris+stapleton&album=

I aim for around -12 to -10dB RMS for my mixes and don't really have any issues with loudness when comparing to commercial releases.

Lately, I've come to the conclusion that it really doesn't matter. Mix and master to make the song sound the best it can. Some songs just naturally need more compression and maybe even a little pumping. Some need to be more open and clear. Whatever sounds best will be fine... as long as it's somewhat louder than the streaming service is set for. For instance, Spotify is going for -14LUFS-I. If the song I uploaded is -10LUFS, Spotify will turn down the whole track by 4dB. That is fine. It will sound the same. I'm just glad no one (to my knowledge) is using a limiter to turn down the tracks. That would alter how the mix sounds, which would be very bad. I believe they run the song through some program that tells them the LUFS-I. From that, they apply a loudness penalty to bring it into the required LUFS.

On a side note, LUFS-I is a pretty horrible way to judge loudness. You can have a song that is 80% around -14dB and then the last 20% can be absolutely slammed at -5dB and the integrated LUFS will still show a moderate level. So, it can get pretty confusing. I think it's pointless to shoot for a specific LUFS. -7 to -10 seems to be working fine for everything I've been involved in for the last few years. It all depends on the style of music and the specific track. Just make it sound how you want it to sound. They will apply a loudness penalty anyway, so stop worrying about it.

yes, sounds about right in my mind too. I don’t really look at RMS during mixing, only true peak to avoid clipping, but masters I like to see around 8ish RMS, so that would probably leave the mix somewhere around what you are describing.

How do you limit a 5150?

That's funny - I was reading that article only a few hours ago myself.