There are certainly ways to write/mix music that results in them being perceived louder without measuring louder. For example, having a loud part at the beginning to catch the ear after the previous song's outro, before taking the listener on a journey to wherever the song needs to sit. Or using sho...

Yeah, what they said! You need a reference listening level. That article of Hugh's linked to above explains that concept pretty much perfectly. This achieved two things. (1) it gives you a reference point; you can learn how good-sounding tracks sound at that level and should then know instinctively ...

merlyn wrote: ↑Wed May 17, 2023 12:05 pmThe big three DAWs are Logic, Ableton and Pro Tools

What's this 'big three' you speak of? I mean, they're certainly *three of* the big DAWS. But there are few plug-in developers who'd overlook testing on, say, Studio One, Cubase or Nuendo.

Good spot — it's the update from 5.3 to 5.4. Now fixed.

There are loads of old SOS articles that might help you get your head around this stuff. But for starters, you might find the article I wrote recently on How To Achieve Better Separation In Your Mixes helpful. This is a superb article Matt. To have distilled into one article what could be written i...

Most of the answer lies in arrangement, instrumentation/sound selection, performance and mixing techniques. Get that stuff right, and you should find that achieving loudness at stereo bus/mastering stage is actually pretty easy. Get it wrong, and when you start to apply limiting, multiband compressi...

It's just noise... so if it's loud enough you can hear it. But in practice, dithering to 16-bits, it's really not that loud. This SOS article has audio examples, including an exaggerated one dithering to 3 bits. Worth reading/listening.

Digital Problems, Practical Solutions

The whole things a bit of a minefield. There's someone out there though! A chap called Ian Shepherd... Yes, it was Ian who I interviewed for one of the SOS articles mentioned at the outset . A few years ago, he also created a series of video tutorials for us called Mastering Essentials , which are ...

Drew Stephenson wrote: ↑Thu May 11, 2023 7:00 pmYou can also pointlessly extend this metaphor

Don't sea it. Hear it!

Yes, both approaches can make the figures read a certain way, but I'd definitely go with the 'slightly longer' answer if the aim is a good-sounding, loud, punchy mix: design your track from the writing and sound selection stage up to sound that way... But I'm curious: why on earth would you want to ...

Lovely; sounds like a good purchase. I would have suggested just buying the one you knew you liked — I've rarely regretted doing that, but I've often regretted getting 'nearly' what I wanted! But then I went on to eBay, and was surprised to see just how much my C414 B-ULS has gone up in value in rec...