No, I appreciate and respect your comments, Glen. And I hope this discussion helps others form their own opinions as well.
I do have to start off reminding you that I DO work with audio for video, which is a whole different beast altogether. There has been, for quite some time, a fight for standardization in the video industry with regards to audio. Much more so than anyone (Bob Katz being one) have done for the music world. A perfect example is the creation of George Lucas' THX. The whole point of his creation of these standards was so the producer's mix will sound exactly the same way the mixing engineer intended when played back in a THX auditorium. Then of course there are Dolby standards. Similarly, in the local markets there are broadcast standards. Much like the radio stations that have to smash everything with a 40:1 limiter in order to air a song, TV broadcast stations follow guidelines as well and in many cases will send back a mix to the engineer if they do not follow those guidelines.
THIS is why I feel it's important to watch the meters. I have to deal with it day to day and although maybe at once I thought it was constraining, I ended up liking it. The only downside is, much like music, there isn't a single, across the board standard for all these separate places to send my mix. But it's closer to one. Many of them I do not deal with (we aren't that big of a company with top named clients all the time...so we don't do mixes for Discovery Channel or the like
)....and because I don't deal with them we keep a generic, in house, standard for not only broadcast usage, but for corporate usage as well (drug/medical companies, Colgate, AMC, Sprint, etc). This way anytime we send them a mastered production, my levels are going to be similar. The last time I sent them an interview with music and foleyed sound effects...is going to sound the same (volume wise) through their TVs, conference room speakers, or large event speakers as my new mix is. However, I DO NOT mix each track to it's own specific RMS value. When I talk about watching the meters, this is only for stereo program purposes. I let each track fit where it should lie according to my ears.
And when I was talking about my in house standard earlier, I meant calibration tones for all our gear. I'm the only audio engineer at our company (the rest are video) and it was set a long time ago before I got there that -20dBFS = 0VU on the analog equipment. Which is actually what most video broadcast stations follow. But following RMS levels also helps me determine what it's going to look like on analog Beta SP tape that we're going to make the final duplication tapes on.
You talked about comparing a Bob Dylan ballad to a Kiss anthem. Or maybe should we compare to a Foo Fighter's album. We KNOW (and complain) very much how the overall loudness in music has changed over the years. How mastering engineer compress the hell out of albums and ruined the dynamic range. WHY has there been such a change over the years? If there was a standardization set would this have happened? Would bands still be sending their albums to mastering engineers so that not only does their CD sound louder than the next band, but all their tracks sound coherent EQ and volume wise? Aren't some mastering engineers doing just that right now...putting all the tracks on an album to set average volume levels so that people don't have to constantly change the volume on their CD players?
If a standardization had been set for music, would we have people complaining that they have to turn up their old albums that were originally recorded in the 60's? Maybe dynamics of an album today would have the same dynamics they did 30 years ago. A soft section in a ballad would be just as soft as we heard it then, and a loud section in a rock piece would be just as loud. And maybe I wouldn't be the only one advocating that we not complain about having to turn "vintage" mixes up in order to get them to sound "normal" in our car....but rather complain about having to turn down contemporary CDs and radio broadcasts.
And of course you brought up the Fletcher-Munson curve which many believe there is an average amount of people that hear all frequencies pretty evenly at one SPL level. Hence why the difference between 1kHz and 20kHz sounds closer and closer the more you turn up your speakers. Of course, we need to keep that within reasonable limits.
Glen, I really would not be surprised if you took an average SPL reading of your room during several mixing sessions and found them all to be fairly the same level. I think it's habit forming. The human ear just likes to find that comfortable listening level (hence the reason people want the evening out of volume levels of CD masters...the difference is the mix engineer wants to keep the dynamics at the same time).
But I agree that you shouldn't constrain yourself to one SPL for the entire time. Sure, listen to how the mix holds together at lower and higher volumes for those extreme cases...but I like to keep one reference level that I can return to. So I can jump from project to project and not have to adjust my monitor volume each time I do so.
I think me and you continue to butt heads about this every 5 or 6 months it seems. And although I am no expert by any means at this stuff, there are many respected engineers out there (Katz included) who DO believe in a set standard.
Funny enough, my background is music and you'd think I'd share your view on trying to keep the art of it all...which maybe in my mind I am. But I guess at the same time we are audio
engineers, and there is science as well as an art behind what we do.
-B
. But the thread, like a good mix, just kinda led that way. 
(J/K...mostly.) I admire Katz's intellect and knowledge of engineering, and I have great respect for him, but with no diminishment of that respect intended, I frankly find a lot (not all) of his paperwork to be intellectual and numerical tours de force that often wind up losing track of the reality behind the numbers.
)
