I heard an interview with Andrew Scheps the other day and he mentioned he didn't pay attention to lufs or streaming specs, which i found kind of surprising. He said he hasnt run into any issues with clients as far as the level/mixes on streaming.

Ive been out of commission so ive not gotten around to testing it out, but it seems logical to use lufs.

kmetal, post: 465415, member: 37533 wrote: I heard an interview with Andrew Scheps the other day and he mentioned he didn't pay attention to lufs or streaming specs, which i found kind of surprising. He said he hasnt run into any issues with clients as far as the level/mixes on streaming.

Ive been out of commission so ive not gotten around to testing it out, but it seems logical to use lufs.

As I understand it, it won't create any problem. Maybe Andrew has been mastering at lower levels for many years.. Where it get's tricky is for those who push the final limiter too far to cut a very hot CD.
Again it's my understanding and please correct me if I'm wrong, but when those hot files are uploaded, they will play fine, but their general levels will be put down, so you get a song with less dynamics because of the limiting and at a lower level.
You see the more dynamic music will have the same calculated level, but it will allow for lower parts and hotter parts if the sum is what is calculated..

pcrecord, post: 465417, member: 46460 wrote: Again it's my understanding and please correct me if I'm wrong, but when those hot files are uploaded, they will play fine, but their general levels will be put down, so you get a song with less dynamics because of the limiting and at a lower level.
You see the more dynamic music will have the same calculated level, but it will allow for lower parts and hotter parts if the sum is what is calculated..

That's how i understood it too. Maybe Amdrew just doesn't care that the volume is reduced, or would limit heavy anyway, so its literrally just a volume reduction. He did Metalica's death magnetic which won the loudness war, lol, so i suspect he's not shy with limiter.

If you do want to limit more for creative reasons, but it exceeds the streaming lufs limit, what would be the solution? Would you normalize the master to lower level? Maybe just do a clip gain reduction on the master?

If you master really loud, the song will just get turned down by the streaming service, and your peaks will be lower than other songs. If you master really quiet then the streaming service has to apply its limiters to the audio to get it up to the spec without clipping. If you master to the spec then the song will be using the full dynamic range available, which is great if that's what you're going for.

Thanks for the video. Well explanatory. Gained few things I will like to try out

I have been doing research for many years about 'what happens to recordings after mastering'.   There is a process that seems to be often done to post-master recordings.   It can be relatively benign, but not always.   This is not a normal compressor limiter, but is primarily a dispersive compressor (infinite attack/release time without clipping), but also has a compression component at low levels.

Dynamic material can be hit pretty hard, but not hard limiting.

It might be good to do an A/B comparison if you can, then judge what you want to do in your own mastered recordings.  Most people don't complain about the processing, but it is a 'learned' or 'accomodated' taste, which was actually the 'digital sound' that was complained about in the 1980s.

John