I would really love the loudness analyzer in the montage mode to give me what Youlean (maker of the famous Youlean Meter plugin) calls “Average Dynamics”
They describe it as follows : *“This represents the difference between the maximum peak and the integrated loudness. This feature is also known as Peak-to-Loudness ratio (PLR). You guessed it, here, we are talking about the true peak.”
*
Of course I know this is not an “official” measurement as you subtract figures in two different scales, but it is VERY useful.
If you want to master for streaming platforms in general, this is important, notably on Spotify. They will normalize to -14 LUFS, but only if in doing so the true Peak value does not exceed -1dBFS TP. THey will set the overall volume to whatever value needed to avoid reaching -1 TP. This means that excessive dynamics will make your music quieter that the competition
That means you need this famous “a peak to loudness ratio” not to exceed 13.
BUT actually this is not enough : if you want to avoid the atrocious limiter that kicks in when your premium spotify account is set to “LOUD”, then you want this ratio to be somewhere between 9 and 10 if you music is consistently loud. Because as they will raise in Loud mode the LUFS target to -11LUFS, the peaks that will then go over -1 TP, will get squashed… HARD. So on most music I will aim to keep this ratio actually around 9. Which of course needs a little more dynamic control effort.
Thanks
Mark
