Hi David,

Thank you for posting this. I have never stumbled across LUFS before and since your post, I've been doing a bit of homework. It's definitely something worth getting a handle on.

I found the below video by Ian Shepherd an excellent presentation on understanding how peak, RMS, integrated loudness and LUFS correlate. The video is 19 minutes long and it was time really well spent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31zHqzjRn4c

From the Youtube clip, it seems that many of today's songs will have a LUFS around -11. Since, according to the video, -23 integrated loudness is the required value for broadcasting, a piece of music that has an engineered value of -11 will be turned down by 12dB (the difference between -11 and -23) at the time of broadcasting.

As a comparison, the video clip also says that a piece of classical music that has an integrated loudness of less than -23 will be lifted up to -23 at broadcasting.

My overall, still-early-days-novice take on this is that the -24 LUFS that you mention is not necessarily an audio level that sound engineers strive to achieve when mixing and mastering, it's what they strive to achieve when adjusting audio for broadcasting as radio or TV.

Thanks for starting me on a new journey!

Regards,
Noel

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Audiophile BIAB 2024