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Dolby Atmos Mastering: A Conversation with Gavin McGrath

2026-10-07T00:00:00-07:00

Not long ago, mastering in Dolby Atmos was a controversial idea. Some people said it wasn’t necessary; others said it wasn’t even possible. The field has moved quickly since then, and there are now several practical ways to master an Atmos release, and good reasons to do it.

Mastering engineer Ian Shepherd recently sat down with Gavin McGrath of Zvuk Mastering, whose clients include Yungblud, Amy Winehouse, Pixie Lott, Jamie Cullum and Courtney Pine, to talk through how he approaches Atmos mastering, using two very different real-world projects as examples.

Gavin also worked with us on bringing immersive support to Perception AB, so partway through the video he shows how it fits into his Atmos workflow for level-matched comparisons.

You can watch the full conversation here:

Here are some of the key points from the conversation.

Why Atmos mastering is different: there’s no output bus

In stereo or 5.1, the mastering chain goes on the master bus. Every file is destined for a specific speaker (left, center, right, left surround and so on), so there’s a single place where all the audio comes together.

An Atmos master doesn’t work like that. An ADM file can contain up to 128 tracks of audio, split between beds (audio assigned to fixed speaker positions, like a traditional surround mix) and objects (audio with positional metadata that can move around the listener). Where each element ends up is decided at playback, by a renderer that knows whether you’re listening on a full 9.1.6 system, a 5.1 setup, stereo speakers or headphones.

Because the final mix is only created at the moment of playback, there’s no output bus to put a mastering chain on. To make a simple change, like reducing the bass across the whole track, you need the same processing, with identical settings, on every single channel.

Engineers have developed ways to do this in Pro Tools, Logic and other DAWs. WaveLab 13 takes a different approach: you drop a single plugin onto the output, and behind the scenes WaveLab creates as many instances as it needs to process every channel in the project. You adjust one plugin, and the change applies everywhere.

“Atmos is exactly the same as stereo”

What’s interesting about Gavin’s approach is how familiar it is. When Ian asks whether Atmos mastering is different from stereo, his answer is simple: you get good mixes and bad mixes, phase issues, peak overs and distortion. They’re the same problems, and he deals with them the same way.

That extends to how he thinks about the mix itself. Because an ADM file contains every bed and object, a mastering engineer can technically reach in and adjust individual elements. Gavin chooses not to. Mastering, as he sees it, is about the overall view of the music. He treats it as one holistic piece of audio, exactly as he would in stereo.

Limiting for compliance, not loudness

One place Atmos does differ is in how limiting is used. Atmos has plenty of headroom, so using a limiter or clipper at all might seem surprising. But Gavin isn’t using them to make anything louder.

As Gavin explains it, the spec he works to is a maximum of -18 LUFS and -1 dB true peak, and he needs it to hold up as the audio folds down from 7.1.4 or 9.1.6 to stereo and binaural. If a master goes over, it doesn’t meet the technical requirements, and major labels will simply reject it. So Gavin uses limiting to catch those overs, matching input and output levels rather than pushing for loudness.

A look inside the chain

Working on an orchestral project recorded at Synchron Stage in Vienna, Gavin walks through his processing chain. Here’s what he’s doing:

He doesn’t use broadband compression. He wants the music to move and breathe, and to do as little to it as possible.
Each processor makes a small, targeted move: a gentle shelving dynamic EQ, a subtle EQ clean-up of “honk” in the 500–700 Hz range (common with big rooms and lots of mics), and dynamic control in the low mids.
Instead of de-essing, he uses HF limiting. Orchestral recordings can get spitty in the violins, but he finds de-essers unnatural, so he combines high-frequency limiting with a dynamic EQ in front of it. That gives him more control.
The gain reduction is small. The HF limiter and the low-mid dynamic EQ shown in the video are each doing around a dB or two, and always relax back to zero rather than grabbing constantly.
He uses linear-phase tools where possible, to avoid altering the phase of the music.

As Gavin puts it, the chain looks heavy-handed on paper, but it isn’t when you A/B it.

For Gavin, working in WaveLab has another advantage: he can open several Atmos sessions at once and balance them against each other, to make an album work as a cohesive whole. In many other workflows, that kind of adjustment has to happen after the ADM file has already been bounced.

Common questions

Should mastering change the binaural render settings?

Generally not. Binaural settings are part of the artistic intention of the mix, and if they’ve been set well, they should be left alone. The exception in the video is Apple’s own Spatial Audio demo track: Gavin found that settings in Apple’s renderer made it more reverberant and bigger-sounding than the stereo and 7.1.4 versions, so for this example he reduced them to bring the versions closer together. Ian’s view is that when renderers disagree like this, it’s a conversation to have with the client rather than a decision to make alone.

Which matters more, speakers or headphones?

Both, but the balance is heavily tilted. Gavin’s rough estimate is that around 95% of Atmos listening happens on headphones and earbuds, since very few people have a 7.1.4 system at home. Some artists favor a particular binaural render to the point where the speaker version suffers. Gavin says this has been common for a while, and he finds it frustrating, because it undersells what the format can do. As Ian points out, the job is the same as in stereo: making sure the music translates everywhere it will be heard. With Atmos, there are simply more places to check, including the Dolby and Apple renderers, which can sound quite different.

Beds or objects?

The two projects in the video are laid out very differently, which makes for a useful comparison:

The Apple demo has a 7.1.2 bed carrying most of the music, with moving objects layered on top, like sounds thrown to the back of the room or rotating around the listener.
The orchestral project uses the bed only for the LFE. Everything else, including the left, center, right, surround and height channels, is delivered as objects assigned to fixed speaker positions.

Why do it the second way? Partly because it makes 7.1.4 stem delivery straightforward, and partly for sound quality: Gavin says there can be a sonic disadvantage to putting height channels in the bed. Ian has heard other engineers explain why. Height channels in a bed can fold down oddly to binaural, while objects tend to translate to stereo and binaural more cleanly. Gavin agrees.

Part of the reason for workarounds like this is that Atmos was designed for film, with beds intended for dialogue, effects and music beds. As Gavin points out, music engineers have had to adapt it.

How much control should the mastering engineer have?

Some mix engineers are wary of Atmos mastering because the ADM file effectively contains the entire mix. Layouts like the orchestral project address this directly: once the music is bounced into objects at fixed positions, you can’t go in and turn down the timpani. That keeps the mix in the mix engineer’s hands, and steers mastering back toward a traditional, whole-picture approach. That’s how Gavin prefers to work anyway.

Judging your changes fairly

Early in the video, Gavin drops a single EQ onto the output of the Apple demo project, with a deliberately extreme bass cut, and WaveLab applies it across every channel. Listening back, Ian notices something besides the change in tone: the whole mix seems to get quieter.

This is one of the oldest traps in mastering. Louder tends to sound better, and quieter tends to sound worse, so any processing that changes the level makes a fair comparison almost impossible. You end up judging the volume change rather than the processing itself. We’ve written about this “loudness deception” before, and it’s something we care about a lot: a level difference of a dB or two is easy to mistake for an improvement, so the only way to judge a change fairly is to take the level difference out of the equation.

In Atmos the problem is multiplied. Instead of one stereo bus, the change is happening across dozens of channels, heard through several different renderers. The solution is the same as in stereo, though: compare before and after at matched loudness. That means measuring each channel at two points, before the mastering chain and after it, and compensating for the difference, so that switching between the two lets you hear only what the processing is doing.

In the video, this is done with Perception AB. Version 1.5, a free update for existing users, added support for channel layouts up to 7.1.4. The workflow in WaveLab looks like this:

Insert a pre instance at the start of the chain on the output track, holding Shift while selecting Pre, so that every hidden instance WaveLab creates is set the same way.
Insert a post instance at the end of the chain, again holding Shift while selecting Post. WaveLab pairs and syncs the pre and post instances automatically.
Enable Link, so that switching between pre and post, or matching levels, applies to every instance in the session at once.

Perception AB 1.5: the Link toggle sits at the lower left, with the Auto toggle next to Match Level.

From there, a single click compares the entire mastering chain against the unprocessed audio, at matched loudness, across every bed and object.

That’s what makes it useful on a chain like Gavin’s orchestral one. That project can’t be played in the video for copyright reasons, but with a pre instance at the start of his chain and a post instance at the end, the whole thing can be bypassed at matched loudness. Ian heard the project while they were preparing the video, and says the changes are very subtle, but very worthwhile.

Auto Match Level came directly out of Gavin’s work. Every so often, people had asked for an automatic mode that keeps the pre and post loudness continuously matched, and Ian had always been resistant to it. Gavin argued that he was re-matching so often on Atmos projects that it was essential, so we added it. Having used it, Ian admits he quite likes it.

The same approach works in Pro Tools, Logic and most other DAWs that let you add a plugin to every channel at once.

Thanks to Gavin for sharing his time, his projects and his approach. You can find out more about his work at zvukmastering.com.

And if you’d like to learn more about Perception AB, you can find full details on the Perception AB page.

Loudness Penalty 2: More Detail, Same Simple Question

2026-06-22T00:00:00-07:00

Will your music be turned down by online streaming services? That’s the question Loudness Penalty has answered since day one — and it’s still the question Loudness Penalty 2 answers. Insert the plugin on your master, press play, and see exactly how much each service will turn your track up or down.

What’s changed in version 2 is everything around that answer. We’ve kept the core as simple as it’s always been, but added a layer of detail and nuance for the moments when a single number isn’t the whole story. You can ignore all of it and use the plugin exactly as before. Or you can dig in when a track raises a question worth investigating.

Prefer to watch first? Mastering engineer Ian Shepherd walks through everything new in this video:

Here’s what’s new.

Block view: the whole loudness picture at a glance

The biggest addition is the block view. It packs a lot of information into an easy-to-read display:

Max true peak — the top of the block
Integrated loudness — the horizontal pink line through the block
Loudness range (LRA) — the solid white section of the block
Peak to loudness ratio (PLR) — the distance between the top of the block and the loudness line
Clipping indicator - the solid red section at the top of the block
Pink chevrons - the amount the track will be turned down (or up)

Together these tell you, at a glance, how loud your track is, how much its loudness varies, and how much headroom sits between your peaks and your average level. PLR in particular is a quick read on how much dynamic room your master has — a small PLR means a dense, heavily limited track; a larger one means more peak headroom.

The block view: max true peak, integrated loudness, loudness range and PLR on a single display.

The block view really comes alive when you click a streaming service. The display shifts to show how that service’s normalization will reshape the block — where your loudness lands after the gain offset, and, crucially, whether your peaks will clip in the process. It’s one thing to read a penalty score; it’s another to see what that score does to your music’s loudness and headroom.

Hear Spotify’s Loud-mode limiter

Spotify’s “Loud” listening mode is the only streaming setting that applies a limiter rather than a simple gain change — and until now there was no way to know what it was doing to your music. Loudness Penalty 2 emulates that limiter directly in your DAW, with a real-time readout of the gain reduction it’s applying. You can preview the limited result, and solo the difference to hear exactly what’s being removed.

The gain reduction indicator shows, in real time, how much the Spotify Loud limiter is removing.

It’s a genuinely useful window into a part of the playback chain that’s normally invisible. That said, Loud mode is Premium-only and off by default, so we’d caution against making mastering decisions around it — it’s there for understanding, not for chasing.

New scores: Spotify Quiet, Spotify Loud, and YouTube Music

Version 2 adds penalty scores for Spotify Quiet (-19 LUFS), Spotify Loud (-11 LUFS), and YouTube Music (-7 LUFS) — the highest distribution loudness of any service we model. Between these and the existing scores, you can now see how your track fares across every common listening configuration, not just the defaults.

Lock your measurements

The new lock button freezes every measurement — integrated loudness, max true peak, loudness range — so the penalty scores and the block view stop updating. This solves a real workflow annoyance: once you’ve measured a whole song end to end, you often want to preview specific sections without the numbers drifting as you scrub around. Lock the measurements, then audition freely.

A UI that fits your session

Loudness Penalty 2 is fully resizable — drag the corner, or pick from preset sizes. The most useful addition is a compact list view (“mini” mode) that trims the interface down to a single strip of the numbers you need. It’s small enough to sit beside a busy mastering session, but complete enough that you’re not giving anything up to keep it open.

Mini mode: a compact list view that fits beside a busy session.

A word about LUFS targets

With more numbers on screen, it’s worth repeating something we feel strongly about: there is no magic LUFS target.

The common advice to “master to -14 LUFS” treats a service’s distribution loudness as a goal to hit. In our experience that’s misguided. It doesn’t make sense for an acoustic ballad and a full-tilt rock song to sit at the same loudness — the differences between them are the point. Aiming for a number tends to flatten exactly the contrast that makes music feel like music.

Loudness Penalty 2 isn’t a target to chase. It’s a tool for understanding — for seeing and hearing how each service will treat your track, so you can make an informed decision. The plugin tells you what will happen. What to do about it is, and always should be, the engineer’s call.

Here are two situations where that distinction matters.

Example 1: a large negative penalty

Say your master shows a big negative score — it’s going to be turned down significantly on most services. That’s not a problem to fix so much as an opportunity worth exploring. Because the service is going to lower your overall level anyway, you’re not gaining loudness by pushing so hard — you’re only spending dynamic range to get there.

Try a more dynamic version. Pull the overall loudness down, and use the headroom you free up to let key sections — a chorus, a drop, a final climax — actually pop. The track may end up at the same playback loudness after normalization, but with more punch and contrast than the squashed version had. Use preview mode to compare the two at matched playback levels and decide which one you prefer. Often the more dynamic one wins.

Example 2: a very quiet track

Now the opposite. A very quiet track might not get turned up to meet the target — and that surprises people. YouTube and TIDAL don’t raise the level of quiet material at all, so a quiet master simply plays quiet there. Apple and Spotify (in Normal mode) will boost quiet songs, but only so far: they cap the increase to keep your max true peak from clipping. So a quiet track with peaks already close to 0 dBFS can be held back from reaching full playback loudness.

And in Spotify’s Loud mode, the limiter enters the picture — boosting a dynamic, quiet track toward -11 LUFS can drive its peaks into the limiter, reshaping it in ways the limiter preview will show you.

The block view makes all of this visible: you can see whether your peaks are leaving level on the table, and decide whether a touch more true-peak headroom management is worth it.

Available now

Loudness Penalty 2 is available in AAX, AU, and VST formats for macOS and Windows. It costs $49, and upgrades from version 1 are available. You can find full details on the product page, or try the free web tool for a quick check on a rendered file.

Loudness Penalty 2 gives you more to look at than ever before. But its job hasn’t changed: to show you what’s happening, and leave the creative decisions where they belong — with you.

Dynameter 2 Reviewed in Sound On Sound

2026-03-29T00:00:00-07:00

Dynameter 2 has been reviewed in the April 2026 issue of Sound On Sound by Matt Houghton. We’re pleased to share some highlights from the review.

The Verdict

Matt’s conclusion is encouraging:

“this is a very worthwhile update to Dynameter, and while there remains a tiny bit of room for improvement that’s mostly just wish-list stuff… Dynameter 2 already works very well indeed. So I have zero hesitation in recommending that existing users upgrade.”

He also notes that his own experience lined up well with the PSR methodology:

“Encouragingly, all my own tracks that I felt already sounded spot-on measured well!”

That’s a good sign - it means Dynameter isn’t second-guessing your ears. When your instincts are right, the meter confirms it.

PSR and “Potting the 8”

One of the things the review explores is the PSR (Peak to Short-term Loudness Ratio) methodology that Dynameter is built on. PSR measures the gap between your peaks and your short-term loudness - in other words, the density and dynamics of your audio, moment by moment.

Ian Shepherd’s suggestion is that the loudest sections of tracks in any genre, after mastering, should have a minimum PSR of around 8. Matt found this to be a reliable guide:

“‘potting the 8’ always seems to guide me toward good, impactful results.”

(“Potting” refers to setting a potentiometer - in this case, aiming for a PSR target of 8.)

Of course, 8 isn’t a rule. You could choose a different number and Dynameter would still help you mix and master consistently - it has presets to assist with that. But as a starting point for music with punch and impact, it’s a solid reference.

What the New Modes Reveal

Dynameter 2 introduced three new display modes alongside the original Classic view: Stereo, Mid/Side, and Multiband. Matt found practical uses for each.

In Mid/Side mode, he could quickly identify where a track’s sense of dynamics might be lost on mono playback - useful for checking how your music translates to single-speaker systems like phones and smart speakers.

Mid/Side mode: the mid and side channels displayed separately, making it easy to spot where dynamics differ between the two.

Multiband mode breaks the signal into three frequency bands. Combined with the new Peak Aware function, it helped him decipher whether high-density sections were caused by peak limiting or by something inherent in the mix, like a sustained organ note or a pad:

“when you zoom in on a red/brown region with Peak Aware engaged, dense sections with peaks below your limiter threshold are typically not things you’ll need to worry about.”

Multiband mode with Peak Aware: the low band (left) shows dense, red/brown dynamics - but the peaks aren’t hitting the ceiling. This density is inherent in the material, not caused by limiting.

This distinction matters. Not all density is a problem - sometimes it’s just the character of the music. Dynameter 2 helps you tell the difference.

How It Compares

The review also mentions alternatives on the market, noting that tools based on the older RMS crest factor approach are “oversensitive to bass” and “can’t match Dynameter 2’s more extensive functionality.” PSR’s use of ITU-R BS.1770-3 short-term loudness instead of RMS gives it a more reliable picture of perceived dynamics.

Read the Full Review

You can read Matt Houghton’s full review on the Sound On Sound website.

And if you’d like to try Dynameter 2 for yourself, click here.

Mastering With Perception AB

2022-06-14T00:00:00-07:00

What loudness should you aim for when releasing music online? As loud as possible? As dynamic as possible? -14 LUFS? Everyone is always asking for the perfect number.

But here’s the trick - there is no answer. The best solution instead is to simply master the music to sound as good as possible…

BUT

It’s really important to check exactly how your music will sound when it’s played back online, and make sure you’re also happy with the way it sounds played alongside your favourite reference material.

In this video, Mastering Engineer Ian Shepherd shows you how he achieves this when mastering, using a real-life example to demonstrate how reducing the mastering level gave him more flexibility to sound even better when heard online.

Our Perception AB plugin was designed to make this technique super-fast and easy, as Ian shows in the video. For more information, click here.

Transcript

Hello. In this video I’m going to show you how to defeat the “loudness deception”, which is a fancy way of saying we want to take loudness out of the equation when you’re mastering so that you can get the best possible results without having to worry about the loudness penalty, having the loudness reduced online.

In fact you could say that this is a strategy for taking advantage of the loudness penalty to some extent, and this is a simple technique involving loudness matching, but I’m actually going to be using my Perception AB plugin, which is specifically designed to make this really fast and easy to do.

I’m going to be using a song recorded by my friend Lij Shaw from the Recording Studio Rockstars podcast. He wrote and recorded this with his daughters a few years ago but it’s getting an official release, and he was testing it on the Loudness Penalty website and noticed that his original master (which he recorded, mixed and mastered himself) was going to be turned down by 6 dB, which he felt was quite a lot. He got in touch with me to ask whether I thought that this was going to be a problem or not.

I took a listen to the song and I thought it sounded really good in fact, but I did agree that 6 db is a big reduction, and I wondered whether there was an opportunity here to get even more out of the master and have it sound even better online, but still stand head and shoulders with everything else that was out there, if it was in a playlist or if somebody listened to it in shuffle, for example.

Let’s take a look and I’ll show you what I found. The first part of this process was obviously to get the unmastered mix from Lij and that’s what you can see here. I’ve also got his original master up here that we can compare with later, and I’m working in Wavelab to do this, but the strategies I’m showing you will work in any digital audio workstation.

Next I mastered the song. And there isn’t time in this video to show you the entire process for that, but Lij and I actually did a webcast recently where I did go through in detail all the decisions that I made and why, and we’ll put a link to that in the description if you would like to check it out. But for now I’ll just play you a little bit so you can get an idea how it sounds…

As you can hear it’s a great indie pop tune, really great hook, which Lij’s daughter came up with, and I’m really pleased with the way that the master sounds. It might surprise you to know that I didn’t aim for any specific numbers when I was mastering this. I’m not worrying at all about what the loudness values measure or read. I’m just mastering it so that it sounds good to me based on my experience as a professional Mastering Engineer. But the first thing you need to do after you’ve finished mastering a song is to make sure that it really sounds better than the original.

I can do that by disabling all of the processing that I’ve used for the song. I was using, incidentally, the TC Electronics MD4 plugin here to apply some gain. I’ve got some EQ, a little bit of gentle multi-band compression. If I bypass all of that we can hear…

That sounds really good to me, but I know from experience that I might be being fooled by the loudness deception. That song is 5, maybe 6 dBs louder in the mastered version than it is in the unmastered mix and that in itself will make things sound better to us. So any professional Mastering Engineer at this point is going to turn down the loudness of the mastered version so that it’s similar to the unmastered mix and compare them that way.

I could do that by ear, which is a key skill that a Mastering Engineer learns over his or her career, or I could use a loudness meter. But for speed I’m going to use my Perception plugin. You can see up here I have just the TC Electronics processing on the clip, and then prior to that I have a Pre instance of my Perception plugin that’s just going to listen to the audio before any of the mastering processing, and then at the end of the chain over here in the master output section I have another instance of Perception which I have open here, which listens to the post signal.

And with that in place I can switch seamlessly between the two like this. And at the moment we’re still hearing that loudness difference, but with Perception all I need to do is click match level, like this, and now we can listen to that without any difference in loudness between the pre-mastered and the post-mastered versions.

To me the mastered version sounds bigger, punchier, has more space, more life, more openness in the sound, even though we’re hearing them at matched loudness, which is exactly how everyone else is going to hear them online in 2022, in roughly 80 or 90 percent of the places you can listen to them. That’s the value of loudness matching when you’re mastering and using Perception AB. You don’t get fooled by the loudness deception. You can make sure that the changes you’re making are really beneficial to the music.

You’re probably asking yourself, “Okay but how does that sound in comparison to Lij’s original master?” Let’s do that comparison…

You can hear of course the original master was quite a bit louder to me. It also sounds a little bit crunchy, a little bit held in, a little bit enclosed in a box, but again we can’t really know for sure until we compare at matched loudness and Perception makes that easy as well.

I have another instance just of Perception. There’s no processing on the original master because I don’t want to change the sound of it, but I can play that and match the level as well. But before I do that I need to change one of the settings in Perception. Over here we’ve got it matching the Post loudness, so it’s turning up the loudness before the processing to be the same loudness as the processing afterwards. But that’s not going to work in this case because the two masters have different loudness. So instead I’m going to choose to match them both to a reference level. We’ll use -14 because that’s the most common level used as a distribution loudness by the online streaming services.

Remember, I didn’t aim for any particular loudness with this master. I just mastered it so that I thought it sounded the best it could musically and this adjustment to -14 is made by the streaming services afterwards. So there’s no need to aim for -14, but we’re now going to be able to match both of these to -14. You can see that Lij’s master here is measuring in at -7.9 LUFS. Let’s just match that to -14.

Whereas my master is measuring -10.7 LUFS and we will now match that to -14 as well. Now we can flick between the new master here and Lij’s original master, both at -14, to see how the sound of those would compare online on YouTube, Spotify, TIDAL, Apple Music - all the major streaming services.

I still prefer my new master and I’m glad to say so did Lij, so that’s the version that is up on Spotify right now. You can listen to it yourself at this link and also flick around between some other songs to compare how it fits in with those as well. And if you’re going to do that make sure you go into the preferences and enable the normalize volume option, “set the same volume level for all songs,” because that’s the default setting and less than 17 percent of users on Spotify disable it. Lots of musicians and engineers turn it off but that’s not how most people listen.

That’s basically it in a nutshell, except that you might choose, having made these comparisons, to make a few tweaks. In this case I was very happy with the mastered sound but I did think I would take the opportunity to just lift out the level of those choruses a little bit. You may have noticed I’ve got some automation moves here so that’s an extra dB of gain there going into the mastering compression just for that chorus.

That’s something that mastering at the lower loudness gives us the opportunity to do. If we tried to do that with Lij’s original master up here it would sound even more crunchy and held in, and potentially even distorted as a result. Whereas this more dynamic master, which sounds just as loud when you listen to it normalized, has more space to move and breathe and have impact.

Let me just demonstrate that to you. It’s a subtle change but here is my master without that level increase… And if I put that back in…

Hopefully you agree that’s just a nice little kick, just a nice little bit of energy that we can add there. And you can also see that I did the same thing at the introduction. I wanted to make sure that when this song played after other songs in a similar genre, maybe in a playlist or if somebody’s listening in shuffle on one of the streaming platforms, there was plenty of energy in the intro. If I play you a comparison between those…

So there you go. That shows you the power of using loudness matching when you’re mastering to take loudness out of the equation. You can avoid being fooled by the loudness deception and make the best possible choices for the music, knowing that because most people hear music online where it’s been normalized, where the loud songs have been turned down, it’s safe to take full advantage of the extra dynamics and actually exploit the loudness penalty.

You know my master will be turned down by about three and a half dB on Youtube and Spotify and TIDAL. This original much louder master will be turned down by 6 dB. But my master sounds just as loud. In fact I think especially in the choruses it sounds a little bit louder and it has more punch, more energy, more excitement, more depth, more space - all those things that we want for our music - and will help it stand out from the competition.

Perception makes that just so quick and easy. We don’t have to manually measure the loudness. We don’t have to worry about any of the numbers. You can just play the audio, press match level and flick between the before and the after of the mastered version and other reference material. In this case I used Lij’s original master but this could be my favourite song by band X, Y and Z, and we can choose to preview them at -14 LUFS to hear in real time how they’re going to sound online.

So there you go. I hope that was useful or interesting. If you would like to see the exact changes that I made when I was remastering that song for Lij we will put the link to the live stream in the description below this video. If you’d like to find out more about Perception AB, including how it can be used in a mixing situation as well as in a mastering context, please head over to meterplugs.com and follow the links there.

My name is Ian Shepherd. Thanks for listening.

Apple Switches to LUFS, Enables Sound Check by Default

2022-03-23T00:00:00-07:00

We’ve been saying it was coming for years, and it finally happened!

Apple has updated their Sound Check loudness normalization algorithm to use LUFS, and enabled it by default on new iOS devices and Macs. But why is this so important?

In a nutshell, Apple was the last major streaming service not using normalization by default, and not using LUFS. But that has changed recently, meaning that the loudest songs will now be reduced in level by default on YouTube, Spotify, TIDAL, Amazon, and Apple Music, on new devices.

And perhaps more importantly, the results between these services will be much more consistent, because they are all using LUFS. So rather than the situation only a few years ago where there were multiple Distribution Loudness levels and methods of measuring loudness in use, things today are much simpler. All these services now use LUFS, and they’re all normalizing to -14 LUFS, apart from Apple, who are following the AES TD1008 guidelines and normalizing music to -16 LUFS.

Which means it’s much simpler to understand and preview how your music will sound in comparison to everything else on these services - and of course our Loudness Penalty website is fully updated and still free to help you do that.

Things are never quite that simple though, so you also need to be aware of a few devilish details:

Firstly, the move to LUFS currently only applies to the most recent versions of macOS and iOS. On iOS most people stay up to date, so this is less of an issue, but on macOS many people wait longer to update, especially musicians.

If you’re still running macOS Mojave for example, you won’t see LUFS being used for normalization in iTunes at the moment, and you need to be aware of that if you’re testing. This may change in future, but for the time being we’re still displaying both the older “Legacy” Sound Check values and the new LUFS values on the Loudness Penalty website and plugin so that you can check both results. The good news is that for most material the differences won’t be huge, but it’s still something to be aware of.

Secondly, the Apple Music website isn’t yet using normalization, so just as with Spotify and TIDAL’s in-browser players, songs will play at their original loudness.

And thirdly, Sound Check is only enabled by default on new installations of iOS or macOS - so if you currently have it disabled, that won’t change unless you choose to enable it by hand. In the short term this means many people will still be listening on Apple devices without normalization. But over time more and more people will have normalization enabled, so you can master your music with optimal musical dynamics, confident that those decisions will hold up over time.

To see how Apple’s move to LUFS affects your own music, head over to the Loudness Penalty website where you can test for free in the browser, without uploading. Discover both the new LUFS and older Legacy Sound Check values, and Preview the results live. And if you’d rather check inside your DAW while you work, the Loudness Penalty plugin brings the same preview to your mixing and mastering sessions.

NB. One final note - at the time of writing there is a known issue with the macOS Music application, which means that Legacy Sound Check values are still being used for downloaded songs. Streamed songs should be using LUFS though, and we can expect this quirk to be fixed in a future update.

Spotify Disabled Their Limiter

2021-07-15T00:00:00-07:00

The title says it all, really - Spotify is one of the few streaming services to actually boost the loudness of quieter songs when normalizing, and until recently it was the only one to use a limiter to avoid clipping when it did this.

Now, that’s no longer true. In our testing, Spotify’s “Set the same volume level for all songs” option won’t increase the Normalized Loudness further if this would result in peak levels above -1 dBTP.

Which is fantastic news - no more extra limiting for deliberately dynamic songs! And, if you choose to master a song at lower levels for musical reasons, Spotify will respect that decision provided it peaks at -1 or higher.

Remember, the limiter was never used on songs that were already mastered loud, and being reduced in level as a result. It was only ever used to increase the loudness of quieter songs. If the loudness of your master is higher than Spotify’s Distribution Loudness level when you upload it, they simply reduce the gain on playback, with no extra processing, and that hasn’t changed.

So if your louder songs sound more crushed than you expect to hear them online, it’s simply in comparison to everything else. You’re no longer being tricked by the loudness deception, and this can make the dynamics processing that’s been used to achieve the high loudness more noticeable.

The Devilish Details

OK, nothing is ever quite that simple…

The Normalized Loudness on Spotify is -14 LUFS for everyone by default, and apparently only 17% of users change this setting. But paid subscribers have some extra options available to them in the Preferences, including three different normalization options. They are:

Quiet	-23 LUFS
Normal	-14 LUFS
Loud	-11 LUFS (For noisy listening environments)

Normal is fine for most users, and Quiet is for people with very quiet, high-quality listening environments.

The idea of the “Loud” mode is that you can use it if you’re listening in a noisy situation where your device doesn’t otherwise have enough gain to hear things clearly. In this case positive gain and limiting will still be used by Spotify if necessary, to prevent hard clipping of more dynamic material. But remember many masters are already louder than -11 LUFS, in which case the limiter will never have to be used on them anyway.

And there’s one final detail to be aware of. As we already mentioned, when Spotify lifts the loudness of quiet songs on the default and Quiet setting, it avoids clipping by only raising the level far enough for the peaks to reach -1 dBTP. But if your song is below the Distribution Loudness and already has peaks higher than this, it will be played at exactly the same level that you uploaded, and will still show those higher peaks as a result. Spotify won’t cause high peaks levels by normalizing, but you might still see peaks higher than -1 dBTP if they are already present in the encoded files for streaming. Which means it’s still worth watching the True Peak levels of your audio before uploading, even if you aren’t mastering super-loud.

Getting Better All the Time?

You may be rolling your eyes at yet another change in the way Spotify’s normalization works. And that’s understandable - it can be tough trying to keep track of all the details and updates in the world of normalization. Especially since it was only recently that Spotify moved to using LUFS for their measurements, in line with YouTube, TIDAL and Amazon Music.

But the good news is, things are getting simpler all the time. All the major music streaming services except Apple Music are now using a Normalized Loudness of -14 LUFS by default, and none of them are using extra limiting or other processing on their default settings.

In comparison to the situation only a year or two ago, where we had multiple different Distribution Loudness levels, multiple different methods of measuring the loudness, and positive gain with limiting on some services but not others, things are getting MUCH simpler, which can only be a good thing.

And if you just want a quick and easy way to Preview what will happen to your music’s loudness when you upload it, our Loudness Penalty website is still available - and still free to use!

Spotify Begins the Move to LUFS Normalization

2020-12-06T00:00:00-08:00

Things are changing again - and for the better!

…eventually.

In a nutshell, Spotify has started to make their long-promised move to using LUFS for loudness normalization, instead of the older ReplayGain-based system.

Wait, WHAT?!

If you’re thinking “I thought Spotify already used LUFS,” that’s understandable - but they weren’t.

It’s understandable because if you put a loudness meter on the output of Spotify with the default settings, it often turns out to be very close to -14 LUFS. And in fact Spotify’s FAQ reflects this, mentioning -14 LUFS several times, and suggesting you target roughly this level when uploading.

But notice the word “roughly.” Elsewhere on the page they explain that the actual system used is an early version of ReplayGain, which gives different results for some songs - sometimes by as much as 3 dB.

How can that be? Surely loudness is loudness, regardless of how you measure it?

Well, yes - and no.

Modern loudness measurements such as LUFS and ReplayGain attempt to model how we perceive loudness, and this depends on things like frequency balance and the duration of loud sounds.

This is similar to “feels like” temperatures you often see on weather forecasts, which try to take factors like wind speed and humidity into account. In the same way, LUFS and ReplayGain both try to assess how loud we perceive the music to be - how loud it feels.

Regardless of how successful you think the results are, all of this means that even though the overall reference level for Spotify measured over longer time periods is typically very close to -14 LUFS, individual songs can sometimes be played back at surprisingly different levels than this number would lead you to expect.

Why does it matter?

Because it changes the way people hear your music.

If the old ReplayGain method gave a loudness change that played your song a little quieter than you expected, it might not hold up against other similar material as well as you’d like – in a playlist, for example. And if it played a little louder, it might hit Spotify’s limiter harder than you’re comfortable with.

(Which was one of the reasons we made the Loudness Penalty website in the first place, so you can find out the results and preview them for yourself, before uploading.)

All this is changing, though. From now, all new uploads to Spotify will be measured for normalization using LUFS, not ReplayGain – the same method used by YouTube, TIDAL, Amazon and others.

And this is a big deal.

In a nutshell, everything just got a lot simpler.

Soon, you won’t have to worry about the differences between ReplayGain and LUFS, because the reference level will simply be -14 LUFS. Which will make everything more predictable and consistent, whether you agree with the decision or not.

So what’s the catch? (There’s always a catch, right?)

A good question, with several answers.

First, the easy one - if your goal is simply to assess how your song will sound on Spotify in future, there is no catch. Simply check you’re happy with the way it sounds when normalized to -14 LUFS, and you’re done.

But second, you’ll have noticed I’ve been using phrases like “eventually,” “in future” and “soon”. And that’s important – the transition has started, but it’s going to take a while to affect everything you hear on Spotify, on all devices.

That’s because there’s a lot of work involved in making the change. As well as switching to the new method of assessing loudness for every new song that gets uploaded, Spotify has to re-measure all the existing songs in their catalogue.

And they need to update the player apps – on iOS, Android, Mac and PC – to pay attention to the new values.

And then users need to update to the latest version of those apps to hear the changes in some cases.

The practical upshot of which is that you may start hearing different normalization results on different tracks, in different clients, for the next few months at least.

Thirdly, you need to pay attention to the effect this difference has on your music, especially if you like dynamics.

The reason I say this is that for some songs, ReplayGain results in a bigger Loudness Penalty than LUFS does with the same material. It pays closer attention to shorter sections of very loud audio, so if your music has a lot of dynamic variety, you may find it turned down more than you’d expect based on using LUFS.

In contrast, LUFS is more tolerant of short, loud sections. Personally I think this is a good thing - it matches how I hear loudness more closely. The disadvantage though is that unlike other platforms, Spotify still uses positive gain for quieter songs, lifting their level, and it’s the only platform to use a limiter to prevent clipping when it does this.

Preventing clipping is a Good Thing, but if you’re a fan of dynamics then extra limiting on your carefully mastered dynamic songs is almost certainly a Bad Thing, especially since there’s no option to control how this limiter works, or how it sounds.

(There’s no extra limiting on louder songs, btw - they just get cleanly reduced in level.)

So with the new settings, you may find that your dynamic masters are more heavily limited when Spotify turns them up than they were with the old ReplayGain system. Hopefully this is something they’ll address before too long, but for now it’s yet another factor to be aware of.

So what do we DO?

Another good question!

And in true audio engineer fashion I’m going to reply… it depends.

More helpfully, I’m going to suggest two different approaches.

If you’re comfortable with the playback level on Spotify being a little unpredictable in the short-term, and aren’t too concerned about variations of a few dB on some devices or platforms in the meantime, you can simply check your music at -14 LUFS before uploading. If it sounds great compared to similar reference material also at -14, you’re good to go. Especially knowing that eventually things will standardize to LUFS normalization being used everywhere.
On the other hand if sounding quieter on Spotify is something you or your clients are concerned about, you’ll want to make sure you check that both the new LUFS and legacy ReplayGain systems give similar results for your music. This will ensure consistent results between platforms and in all territories while the change-over takes place.

This is the approach I’ve been taking with my own mastering for the last few years, to make sure my clients get similar results on both Spotify and YouTube, which already uses LUFS normalization. Luckily I find it often happens naturally when I’m mastering anyway, simply because of the musical choices I’m making, without any special tweaks being necessary at all. But if it doesn’t, I’m able to adjust my strategy slightly to get the two values as similar as possible without compromising the material.

Whichever approach you choose, we’ll be updating the Loudness Penalty site and plugin to display both the new Spotify LUFS values and the legacy ReplayGain values, making this comparison super-quick and simple for you.

Always remember these numbers shouldn’t be thought of as targets. It’s certainly useful to know what will happen to your music online though, and how that will affect its sound in comparison to everything else out there. So if you’re not sure, or just curious, you can make exactly the same checks for yourself for free, and preview the difference to decide what’s best for your music.

Loudness Penalty Now Supports Amazon Music, Deezer

2019-10-15T00:00:00-07:00

We are happy to announce the addition of two new streaming services to the Loudness Penalty website and plugin: Amazon Music and Deezer.

Loudness Penalty plugin with scores for Amazon Music and Deezer

Now you can find out how much your music will be turned down by these services (the so-called “Loudness Penalty”), in addition to YouTube, Spotify, TIDAL, Pandora and iTunes.

Why is this important?

Amazon Music is the fastest growing streaming service, and now exceeds 32 million paid users across Amazon Prime Music and Amazon Music Unlimited. In comparison, Spotify has around 100 million paid subscribers, but is growing more slowly. While not as popular as Amazon Music, Deezer nonetheless has about 7 million paid subscribers.

But there are too many services to consider!

There are a lot of streaming services, but thankfully most of them don’t differ that much in how they normalize music. For example, Amazon’s reference level is -14 LUFS and Deezer’s is -15 LUFS - both in-line with YouTube’s (-14 LUFS).

Plus, we don’t recommend mastering to streaming levels anyway! Instead, Loudness Penalty scores give you an idea of how much dynamic “headroom” you might be missing out on (or perhaps your music is too dynamic), so that you can make the best possible decisions about how to mix and master your music.

Shouldn’t I just trust my ears?

We always recommend trusting your ears. That’s why both the Loudness Penalty website and the plugin let you preview how your music will sound at each streaming service’s reference level. That way, you can make direct comparisons to reference tracks that are available on those services, to ensure that your music stands up to the competition.

Desktop, Mobile and Web

At the time of writing, Amazon’s desktop and mobile players offer normalization while the web player does not. On the other hand, Deezer’s desktop and web players normalize but its mobile app does not. Each player that supports normalization has it enabled by default.

Try it Now

The Loudness Penalty website is entirely free and so is the plugin update, for existing users. Grab it by entering your email address on our download page.

YouTube Changes Loudness Reference to -14 LUFS

2019-09-18T00:00:00-07:00

This. Changes. Everything.

Well, OK, not really. But something important did change last week: YouTube quietly changed their playback reference level to -14 LUFS.

Wait, WHAT?!

Weren’t they already doing that?

No.

YouTube has been using loudness normalization for years now, but until recently they weren’t using LUFS. In practise the results were likely to be similar, but the actual values revealed in their Stats for nerds information could sometimes be different by as much as 3 dB, in some cases. (Which is why you might have been surprised sometimes if you were aiming for -14 LUFS!)

From now, it’s simpler and easier.

TIDAL, Amazon Music and YouTube are all now using the same method to measure loudness, and aiming for the same reference level as well - and that’s great news!

Loudness normalization gives a better user experience, but it can be tough to get your head around. The more consistency and predictability we can get between platforms, the easier it gets to work with, which can only be a good thing.

So, does this mean you should start mastering everything to -14 LUFS, then?

In a word: no.

As I wrote last month when I reported that Amazon Music have started using normalization, aiming for LUFS targets doesn’t always work well. Partly because some streaming services still aren’t using LUFS yet - noticeably Spotify - but also, no-one would normally master a heavy rock tune at the same loudness as an acoustic ballad, so why would we start now? The streaming services do the normalization so we don’t have to.

It does make sense to understand what will happen on the various streaming sites, though - for three reasons:

It means you can preview things at their normalized loudness to be sure how they’ll sound in comparison to everything else. In particular, some sites (including YouTube and TIDAL) don’t turn quieter songs up. This means that if something is below their reference level, it may sound quieter than you’d like.
It’s worth checking that a platform like Spotify isn’t unexpectedly turning down loud songs further than other sites
Personally if I see something being turned down more than a dB or two, I can’t help feeling curious about how it might sound with a little more room to breathe. And in my experience, it’s usually an experiment worth trying.

Summary

Love it or hate it, normalization is here to stay, and it’s not going away. Anyone who provides audio for online streaming services needs to understand how it works, and how it affects the music they work on.

It’s still early days, but normalization is improving all the time, becoming more effective, more consistent and more predictable. You can experiment with the effects of this on your own music yourself for free, at the www.loudnesspenalty.com website we’ve created - and we’ve already updated it to reflect YouTube’s new reference level. If you’d rather check inside your DAW, there’s also a Loudness Penalty plugin.

We’ll continue to monitor the situation in future and keep you posted, but meanwhile the good news is that normalization is already making it possible to master music with great dynamics, without worrying about the need to “compete” in the “loudness war” as we used to - and focus on the really important stuff: what’s best for the music!

Customer Story: David McKenna, UCLA

2018-06-04T00:00:00-07:00

Meet David McKenna, Post Production and Scoring Stage Manager at UCLA’s School of Theatre, Film and Television.

We had the pleasure of talking to David about how he got started in the music industry, what led him to teach at UCLA and how loudness and dynamics in music have changed over the years.

Enjoy!

MeterPlugs: What sparked your interest in music recording?

David: As a kid, my two best friends were great guitarists and writers. I was neither, so I learned how to record them instead.

I started in 1992 with a 4-track tape machine that I’d bounce to two tracks and then back to the 4-track for additional overdubs, if needed. I learned that trick from Eddie Kramer who used a similar method working with Hendrix and The Beatles.

MP: Did you go to school for music recording?

David: I went to SF State where I learned from John Barsotti - who is kind of a legend in the Bay Area - earning my BA in Recording Engineering and my MA in Production. During that time I was the Production Manager for the college radio station KSFS, taught a few lab and seminar sections, and worked as an intern at several Bay Area recording studios.

MP: How did you get started in the industry after graduating?

David: In 2000, I moved back to LA where I eventually began working at Cherokee Studios, briefly as a 2nd, then Lead Technical Engineer and ultimately Lead Engineer. Most of my work was the typical set-up and tear down, albeit for some really cool artists (I’m not a fan of name dropping, but I’ll say that I did work on a few projects that earned, or were nominated for, GRAMMY’s).

A really important development for me was that I often assisted on mastering sessions at Capitol for the albums I had worked on. It was there that I met Ron McMaster and really got to pick his brain on how to master a song while still keeping the sonic character of the music. This was right at the time when the loudness wars were getting out of hand (although they would continue to do so), so it was great to get his perspective.

MP: What lead you to teaching?

David: Around 2005, I heard that Portland was going to be the “next Seattle” and that I needed to move up there right away to strike while the iron was hot. To say that Portland did not become the next Seattle would probably be a fair statement - I spent more time working on TV projects than music - so I briefly moved back to San Francisco and then ultimately back to Los Angeles where I have been since 2007.

By that time, many of the studios in LA had shuttered due to the collapse of the music industry, so to make ends meet I went into education. I’ve always enjoyed teaching, and it is a unique skill set that not everyone has. In 2009, I got a gig teaching music recording at UCLA as part of my job managing the Scoring Stage at the School of Film. I’ve been doing that ever since.

MP: Which classes do you teach?

David: We have a three-class curriculum that is centered on the basic pillars of tracking, editing and mixing:

The intro class is primarily designed to familiarize the students with the basic skills they need to not break our equipment.

The intermediate class starts to get into the nitty-gritty of more complex recording scenarios, more involved editing tools and a significant focus on how to mix while avoiding the common pitfalls often made in the process.

The advanced class is a partnership with Capitol Studios, where the students get to learn how they track, mix and master both a pop group as well as an orchestra.

MP: What do you teach your students about loudness and dynamics?

David: I have a lecture about preserving dynamics at the end of the intermediate class that is tied into the state of the music industry. I believe the two are in fact linked. Labels have been chasing this imaginary belief that louder songs are better and will result in sales (an oversimplification, but certainly a symptom). I hasten to add that I also have zero sympathy for the illegal downloaders who have irrevocably made music worse through their actions.

But even back in 2000 I was sensitive to how over-compression was ruining the sound and subsequent enjoyment of a number of albums. Recently, I bought an album that was mastered so loud that I threw it away after one painful listen, even though it was a famous band that I genuinely enjoyed in a live setting.

When I gave my first intermediate class in 2010, my mastering lecture was already in place. It was really very simple to construct:

I took a number of songs culled from Rolling Stone’s top 500 albums from the 1960s to the present day (or at least pretty recently). I’ve been buying CDs from a very early age, and a number of these releases were often pure digital “masters” made from the original tapes. It took several years before labels began “re-mastering” albums and adding unnecessary EQs and compression to try to sell to a newer generation of buyers. I avoided using those altered versions in my presentation.

My Pro Tools session has two progressions. The first progression is just me playing the songs - typically a few bars at a time - in sequence. I start with the first song at a moderate volume and say in a normal speaking voice the years of release, “1969… 1972… 1973… 1976… 1980…” By the time “1996” comes around, I have to raise my voice a bit to be heard over the louder music. Once I get to the mid 2000s I am shouting. And by the modern day, I am at a full scream to be able to be heard over the master. I then switch back to 1969 to return to sanity.

I then play my second sequence where I have taken all the songs and normalized them to an RMS of -20 dBFS so that they are all the same relative volume. Here I go back and forth from modern songs to older songs and tell the students, “Listen to the snare drum on these two… Listen to the bass guitar one these two… Listen to the vocals here…” In every case, older songs without the ridiculous amount of compression have a greater tonality and depth which is simply not present in modern mixes. It’s not even close.

MP: How have you incorporated Dynameter into your lecture?

David: When I saw your YouTube video about Dynameter, I knew it would help serve to further demonstrate not only the point, but also give a strong counter argument to the popular perception that “louder = better.” If the websites and streaming services that people are hearing music on are already performing a similar volume adjustment like I do on my second sequence, we are only left with worse sounding music (and who wants to buy bad sounding music?).

I was amazed at just how effective your meter was at bolstering my argument. By applying Dynameter on every channel of my first progression of songs (it took two full computer monitors to open all of them simultaneously, which you can do in Pro Tools by simply holding down the Shift key in case your readers are not familiar with that little trick), there was an easy to see evolution where the mixes went from plump green, to yellow, to orange, to red, to brown, and ultimately ashen grey.

Top to bottom: Dynameter showing dynamics getting progressively worse

Given the way the meter populates the image, it was not too hard to add, “Not only do we hear these songs sounding like crap, but we can see that in addition to looking like crap with these brown mixes, but it has gotten into malnourished crap with these grey mixes.” Every student got it.

MP: Do dynamics have a chance? What do you think the future holds?

David: There is so much work that goes into getting a magical performance from a group of musicians. The musicians, engineers, and producer all have to be on this razor thin wire between success and failure.

When compression was used effectively (which based on my lecture went up to about the mid 90s), it could actually serve the music - not too dissimilar from the long pole that tightrope walkers use to keep their balance. After the loudness wars took off in earnest with the development of the iPod in 2001, that pole started to become more and more like a one-ton weight, dragging everything down. But because the human brain is wired to prefer loud sounds over quiet ones, that weight has gotten ever larger.

Back during the Salem witch trials, there was a man named Giles Corey who was “pressed” to death. He was forced to lie down on his back, with a large board placed over his body, and the executioners added boulder after boulder on top until he eventually succumbed to the pressure. Near the very end of his life, they had to shove his tongue back into his mouth with a stick. His last words were, “More weight.” I think of the loudness wars in a similar context. Our brain just keeps saying, “more weight,” all the way to the point that the music has in fact died.

I have a good friend who used to do extreme audio compression for in-flight movies on airplanes so the passenger can hear the whispered dialog over the sound of the jet engines on those horrible headphones. I asked him what his RMS was set to: -6 dBFS. There are songs today with an RMS of -6.5. That is just insane when you think of it. We have music done by professional musicians, engineers and producers that only has slightly more dynamic range than the worst possible listening environment on the planet.

My hope is that we are at the point in the industry in which the tongue is lolling out and the desire for ever louder mixes is about to die. At some point I can’t be the only person who is bothered about this. At some point, I’d think the musicians, engineers and producers would start to push back on this pressure to the preserve the magic they created.

I sincerely hope your Dynameter, coupled with your web-video that demonstrates why it is so important, will help move us back to the realm of sanity. I genuinely look forward to the day when the vast majority of the albums in the past 20 years (and the last 5 in particular) are either re-mastered to remove this awful over-compression, or even re-mixed to undo what a lot of engineers felt they needed to do in order to be “relevant” to the times: I honestly know of engineers who perform this aggressive compression on their output bus so as to deliberately cut out the job of the mastering engineer. Things cannot continue in this manner.

20 years ago I used to buy an album a week. Sometimes two. Now I buy maybe one a year because they are by and large un-listenable. This is not a statement about the quality of the music contained therein; it is purely about the lost tonality. If I knew that albums were being re-released with an RMS of at least -14 (I have to admit a preference for -18), that would prompt me to start buying again. I hope the public will too.