Are you still confused about how to use LUFS correctly while mixing?

Be honest..

Tbh, I’m not surprised. And I bet you are not alone.

For some reason the narrative on loudness measurement has developed a life of its own that is often quite far removed from how to use it in practice.

Whenever I hear or read a new piece on the matter, the first question that always pops up in my mind is: Let’s see if this person actually ever understood loudness measurements, or if they fell in the same trap as everyone else.

And unfortunately, in 90% of the cases, they have no idea what they are talking about.

What somehow got lost completely is that measuring “loudness” in LUFS is NOT an absolute measure of perceived loudness.

It is STILL just a relative measure of volume.

Granted, it’s closer matched to how we humans perceive volume, but it’s still just measuring volume. 

Nothing more, and nothing less.

Unfortunately.

The reason I know this as a fact is that I spent an entire semester back in university centered around this (then new) approach to quantifying loudness. 

And one of things I did was implement the entire set of algorithms in Matlab to then analyze a database of recorded music to see if I could track the impact of the “loudness wars” over the decades in actual data.

A fun little exercise.

And totally pointless as I quickly found out, because “loudness” as measured by the EBU R 128 standard is not an absolute measure.

There is no way to compare the absolute loudness of a song on vinyl vs one on CD for example, because the level at which you digitize the vinyl will directly set its measured loudness.

Therefore there is no absolute “loudness” as measured by EBU R 128. You can just use a simple volume knob to set it where you want it.

BUT it is useful when trying to level-match two pieces of music relative to each other.

And that’s what I want to clarify in this week’s video.