Although the message doesn’t seem to have got through to everyone, the loudness war is over and has been since streaming platforms introduced loudness normalisation. Most of us have a way of measuring the loudness of our sessions. A LUFS meter is built into most premium limiters and if you don’t have one yet there is an excellent free meter available from Youlean.

Once you have a reliable measurement of your integrated loudness you have an idea of whether your track will be turned up or turned down by the loudness normalisation processing applied to your tracks when you upload them to streaming platforms. To further confuse matters, each streaming platform works to a slightly different loudness target though most are around -14LUFS.

How Does Loudness Normalisation End The Loudness War?

In the old days, if you ran your mix into a limiter and, by limiting the audio hard and removing the peaks of the transients it’s possible to raise the average level of a track while still maintaining a peak level just below 0dBFS. This process makes a track stand out from the competition by being louder than other tracks, but the downside is this kind of limiting introduces distortion and reduces the dynamic range in the recording, making for a recording which is fatiguing to listen to and lacks impact and excitement. I jokingly refer to this kind of heavily limited music as ‘Toothpaste’ - think what the waveform looks like and you’ll understand!

So heavy limiting compromises the sound in an attempt to get a perceived advantage of overall level. The problem with this, and the reason the loudness war is effectively over, is that when streaming platforms measure the loudness of heavily limited uploaded tracks and adjust them down to meet the loudness target of the platform, the level advantage is lost compared to less heavily limited tracks but the downsides of distortion and lack of dynamic range remain.

Look After The Dynamics And Let The Loudness Look After Itself?

So should you mix to a loudness target? Mastering Engineer Dave Kutch doesn’t think so. Instead he recommends you just mix the track to sound as good as possible. To mix and master for dynamic range would make more sense than to mix and master to a loudness target. Dynamics are important but so is compression and some tracks will sound better with the added density that limiting brings, others will sound better with the space healthy dynamics allow. The point is that with the motivation to mix loud for loud’s sake removed we can mix for sound - isn’t that the point after all?

In the free extract from PureMix’s Start to Finish: Dave Kutch - Episode 19 - Mastering Part 3 Dave, who has mastered music for major artists like Billie Eilish, The Weeknd, Dua Lipa, Katy Perry and Alicia Keys explains why, although loudness is important, he feels you shouldn’t mix to a loudness target.

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