Hey, what's going on out there? I'm Sean Devine. Hope you all are doing well today
I've got a new tutorial where we're going to talk about metering
We have got a couple of different standards, different metering types, that many of you have questions about
Particularly this new standard that's been implemented into a lot of our digital music platform streaming platforms
It's called LUFS
now you're probably familiar with the older metering which is RMS
And that's one that I use a lot on the channel. I still use it
It's still very useful, but LUFS has become more of the new standard
so we're going to talk about both of these we're gonna talk about what RMS and LUFS actually mean, what they're measuring and
then, which one you should use.
So also don't forget about true peak true. Peak is another very important
Metering tool this is just measuring the loudest point a peak in
your mix or master of your song and it takes into account the
translation from the digital world to the analog world so it's going to be true peak versus just a peak reading and
That's gonna keep you from clipping or distorting on the bus, so let's jump in and let's first talk about
What RMS and LUFS actually stand for?
RMS is root-mean-square, and LUFS is Loudness Units Full Scale
So you don't have to memorize that it's not that important
But if you were curious about what the initials stand for that's that but first let's talk about RMS briefly.
I'm gonna press play, and if you want to just keep an eye on our RMS reading over here
And then we'll talk about what's actually being measured.
All right, so we've got a reading over here of minus eight RMS.
I want to point out also that the level meter
Which is this one –
That's measuring true peak and RMS and our loudness meter
Which is measuring LUFS are the last plug in in our stereo bus or a master bus after our
limiting and mastering processing which is in this case ozone.
So this is measuring the the absolute level after all this stuff is happening and what the actual
loudness and level is going to be when it leaves the D aw so just pointing that out make sure and put those last if
you're measuring it in this way, but let's go back over here, and we've got the minus eight RMS
So what RMS is is its measuring level, but it's measuring a short term average
So whereas the true peak is just gonna measure the absolute
loudest point in the signal rms is taking into account a
short-term measurement, and it's averaging that together
so it's a little bit more accurate and it's gonna give you a little bit more of a perceived loudness sort of measurement although we're
Still talking about strictly level and not loudness
Which we're about to get to you're an LUFS. LUFS is a newer standard
that has been being used in the broadcast television film world
It's something that we had to follow much more closely when I was working in a post-production facility
We were delivering our projects
They had to be within a certain LUFS range
Or have an integrated LUFS figure that matched the standards. So now in the music world
We've been without a quote standard for level and loudness and that is slowly changing
Because they have been wanting to have more consistency after we started getting into the loudness Wars
Where everybody was just trying to make their music super super loud the streaming platforms the digital platforms are said whoa,
whoa, whoa. That's enough
We need a standard and so they've adopted the LUFS and there are some integrated LUFS numbers
Now you hear stuff like Spotify. They're integrated
LUFS standard is minus 14. All right, so what is the LU in LUFS?
What's a loudness unit all you need to remember is that is the it is the equivalent of one decibel?
LUFS is measuring
perceived loudness, so it's different than the decibels that are being read by RMS, so let's talk about the difference between
LUFS and RMS
So where as RMS is only measuring that short term average of level LUFS is
measuring many different things here, and it's doing it in a way that is measuring perceived loudness so our ears hear
loudness in certain ways because
Frequencies can actually be perceived louder than others for instance mid frequencies tend to jump out of speakers
And they tend to present themselves more obviously to the human ear so LUFS takes that sort of thing into account and then
We have some different measurements here, so if you look up here
I'm gonna press play again
And just keep an eye an eye on this "M" the "S" the "I", then the LU range
And then the "I" again, this is the same reading, that's up there. It's called Integrated
Okay, so let's talk about what those were measuring up here the M stands for Momentary
Which is just at that very moment? What is the LUFS reading at that point?
So that's going to be closer to our RMS reading
They are gonna differ a little bit, but then the the "S" is Short-term
So that's gonna be more of a short-term measurement and it averages those together
The LU range is just referring to the difference in the
quietest points of the the signal that's being fed in here and the loudest point and it's referring to it in terms of an
LU or Loudness Unit. And then the "I" is
Integrated. The Integrated is taking into account
the loudness
over the entire span of us playing or feeding the signal through it. So when I press play and stop that entire
segment is being taken it into account to calculate the integrated LUFS.
The integrated is the one that you're seeing as the standard for music because it's measuring the entire song's
Integrated LUFS. So if you see minus 14 that is referring to the Integrated in terms of Spotify standard,
that's the one that you want to focus on. So what should you use? Should you use True Peak, RMS or LUFS?
My personal suggestion is a combination of all three. RMS,
it's not as accurate in terms of perceived loudness obviously.
And I think it's very important that you do want to start getting comfortable
I'm using LUFS a lot more because it's becoming the standard. So I need to be aware of where I want to deliver my
sessions for clients in terms of the integrated LUFS, especially to the digital platforms. That's very important for
using in your overall mix and masters: LUFS.
But then RMS is still very useful for just judging you know signal levels of say your microphone or maybe you want to
measure the loudness of your monitors. It's just something that I'm very comfortable with I think a lot of engineers –
We've been using it for so long that I can just look up and see an RMS number
and I know kind of what I'm going for and it's just a very quick reference point for level.
True peak is very important because we don't want to clip or distort our master buss or go above zero with True Peak
because some of the platforms will actually penalize you. We're gonna talk more about that but in this video
I really just wanted to point out
how to use these metering tools what they mean, what they stand for, and then what the difference is just
generally speaking between RMS and LUFS. So be sure to stay tuned for the next video. We're going to
talk more in depth about how to deliver your music with a target LUFS and RMS. That's going to work
well on the digital platforms and streaming services.
If you have any questions or comments about True Peak, RMS or LUFS, or the differences between these,
feel free to leave a comment below. If you learned anything in the video
Please like subscribe and consider sharing and we'll talk to you soon.