So I've got the new Nugen mastercheck plugin to monitor my loudness levels and have started to wonder about a few things.
For instance Spotify's new lufs normalisation has been lowered to -14 lufs, So from what I can gather from the manual this would be a good starting point for printing our masters. It states that if a mix is beyond this recommendation then the streaming source (Spotify) will turn it down/normalize. what is being said here is that there is no point in compressing our tracks heavily to achieve super loud mixes as this is now futile due to streaming platform's normalization. Ok cool...
But, what if our mixes are not heavily compressed to begin with in the first place?
Let's say 2db of gain reduction on the compressor and another 2-3db on the limiter...
For example I was pushing up the gain on my limiter whilst monitoring mastercheck and was getting the above gain reductions in both compressor and limiter, master check was reading around -10 lufs on the loudest peaks.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but Spotify would only be turning down my mix, not compressing It? I can understand what they're saying if I was getting tonnes of gain reduction on my compressor and limiter, because Spotify would effectively be turning down an already highly compressed mix making it sound thin and lacking in punch.
in my case a printed master at -10 would be suitable for both CD and Spotify right? As there isn't a a huge amount of compression/limiting being applied... who if spotify turn it down, as long as it's not getting compressed even more I don't see an issue.
I probably haven't worded this very well but hopefully you catch my drift
Any help would be much appreciate on this one
For instance Spotify's new lufs normalisation has been lowered to -14 lufs, So from what I can gather from the manual this would be a good starting point for printing our masters. It states that if a mix is beyond this recommendation then the streaming source (Spotify) will turn it down/normalize. what is being said here is that there is no point in compressing our tracks heavily to achieve super loud mixes as this is now futile due to streaming platform's normalization. Ok cool...
But, what if our mixes are not heavily compressed to begin with in the first place?
Let's say 2db of gain reduction on the compressor and another 2-3db on the limiter...
For example I was pushing up the gain on my limiter whilst monitoring mastercheck and was getting the above gain reductions in both compressor and limiter, master check was reading around -10 lufs on the loudest peaks.
Now correct me if I'm wrong, but Spotify would only be turning down my mix, not compressing It? I can understand what they're saying if I was getting tonnes of gain reduction on my compressor and limiter, because Spotify would effectively be turning down an already highly compressed mix making it sound thin and lacking in punch.
in my case a printed master at -10 would be suitable for both CD and Spotify right? As there isn't a a huge amount of compression/limiting being applied... who if spotify turn it down, as long as it's not getting compressed even more I don't see an issue.
I probably haven't worded this very well but hopefully you catch my drift
Any help would be much appreciate on this one