Let's say you're mastering a 12 track album and you want each song to play back at the same perceived loudness. LUFS meters are particularly useful when mastering for formats like CD that don't normalize your songs. Another bonus is that there is no point in sacrificing the audio quality of songs now to achieve greater loudness the louder the song is perceived, the more it will be brought down in level. Ideally, each song that you now hear, as a consumer, sounds roughly just as loud as the next one on YouTube, Spotify, etc. Spotify and other streaming services now normalize songs based on custom algorithms that they run. One of the main issues consumers were experiencing was quiet songs followed by loud songs this caused them to turn the volume up on their listening device for the quiet song, which then forced them to turn the volume down for the louder song. With people sacrificing audio quality for loudness, a very unpleasant listening experience arose for music consumers. It's actually for this very reason that streaming services began normalizing songs in the first place. While this scale is extremely useful for setting target levels that are used to achieve perceived loudness consistency between songs on albums, it's also helped to combat the loudness wars.īefore streaming services began normalizing the level of songs, mastering engineers were attempting to increase the perceived loudness of many songs as much as possible this is because people perceive sounds that are louder as better. If two different songs are both hitting -18 LUFS on a loudness meter, you're probably going to perceive them as just as loud as one another.
Keep in mind that not everything in your song needs to be in phase if something sounds subjectively good in both stereo and mono across various playback systems, then it’s okay.Ī loudness meter or LUFS (Loudness Unit Full Scale) meter displays perceived loudness. In phase signals are represented by patterns appearing within the 45-degree lines, while patterns emerging outside of these lines are out of phase.
Three common vectorscopes include the polar sample vectorscope, polar level vectorscope, and Lissajous vectorscope.Ī polar sample vectorscope uses a polar coordinate display to plot dots per sample. Stereo signals will produce more horizontal shapes as the stereo image widens.
Mono signals will display a vertical line because the information being fed to both the left and right channels is identical. VectorscopesĪ vectorscope displays the similarities and differences between the two channels of a stereo signal. They also come in the form of 3D displays, which tend to display information in a way that’s a bit easier to read than the information presented by a 2D display. Spectrograms often come in the form of 2D displays that use color intensity to represent amplitude, an X value to represent time, and a Y value to represent frequency. This frees up a substantial amount of space on my primary monitor for my other mastering devices.
I like to place Insight 2 on my stereo bus and keep it open on a secondary computer monitor as I work. This is by no means the only metering suite available, but it gets the job done and has a clean GUI. It includes all of the mastering meters on this list and more. The mastering meter suite that I use is iZotope’s Insight 2. The reason I go through this critical listening process before looking at my meters is that meters don’t have ears, and relying on them too heavily can sometimes influence my mastering decisions in a way that is counterproductive. These notes typically include things that I think I’ll be able to correct and/or enhance at a mastering level. I’ll actually listen to a mix a couple times so that I can get familiar with it, and I’ll take notes on the song. Before reaching for any mastering tools or meters, I always start by listening to the mix I’m about to work on, in both stereo and mono, and on different sets of speakers.