My Wavelab 10 LUFS meter seems to read very high, as much as +15 LUFS, on professional masters I have had done, and on commercial CD tracks I import. However, if I connect a third party meter, the LUFS reading is what I would expect it to be, i.e. somewhere around -10 LUFS. Can anybody explain this discrepancy? Am I doing something wrong?
This is because by default, the default setting is some bizarre (to me) broadcast scale that I never really see or hear of anybody using in real life.
Even broadcast and Netflix etc. usually refer to it as -23 LUFS or -27 LUFS and definitely in the music work, we say things like most streaming services normalize to roughly -14 LUFS and that a master is “slammed” if it’s -6 LUFS.
I have been suggesting that WaveLab change the default scaling for awhile now but the good news is that you can change it to full scale in the Functions/Settings area of the Loudness Meter.
See attached.
That did it! Thank you so much for not only taking the time and trouble to reply, but for attaching an image as well. At first I change the scale to ‘Custom Full Scale (LUFS)’, but the readings were still too ‘hot’. Then I noticed the Top and Bottom levels of 0 LUFS and -40 LUFS in your image, copied these, and now the Waves LUFS meter matches my third party LUFS meter perfectly. Many thanks again, Justin, for saving me hours of frustration trying to solve this problem.
No problem. As you can see in the bottom left corner of my image, once you get the settings you like, you can save them as preset so in case anything happens, you can get these settings back.
I set mine like up this a long time ago now so I couldn’t fully remember what was involved to get it looking more “normal” from whatever the default settings are.
Thanks, Justin. This was a measuring device I paid little attention to, now I will use it.
Thank you for pointing that out. I’ll save my settings as a preset too. Cheers.