True Peak Metering - Is Your Loudness Meter Lying to You? (Part 1 Introduction)
- Kiloeve Reviews
- Mar 2, 2021
- 3 min read
Hello, everyone, I’m Alex, and in this two-part post, I will be reviewing three different loudness meters. I will also be giving some suggestions about how to approach loudness in music, and lastly, whether or not you should be thinking about true peak metering.
Why are Level Meters important?
Whether you are a musician, composer, songwriter, performer, or an engineer, more of us nowadays are concerned with achieving the best levels possible in our music. Now that we have the technology and algorithms to do so, it may be worth investigating how your sound translates from digital to analogue. If your music is far too blaring or far too skimpy, this may not translate well into different formats. In this post, I will compare the true peak value levels of three different digital level meters. These are:
● Logic’s multimeter
● Youlean’s loudness meter
● Mastering the Mix’s LEVELs (part 2)
Logic Multimeter
If you’re a Mac user who produces music (in some form) on Apple’s Logic Pro X, you may be familiar with Logic’s multimeter. However, even in a stock meter like this one, the options between “peak & rms” and “TP & rms” do not measure the audio peaks identically. Many new Logic users may assume that they do, due to the idea of setting the ceiling threshold on a limiter at 0.0 or -0.1dBfs. Setting the threshold slightly below does not necessarily mean that the audio will not go past beyond a set ceiling, (even if it is a reliable brickwall limiter) but this is something that newer users may not initially notice.
Although Jeremy Soule, Umbra and MusicToday80 are most likely conscious of their peaks, here are examples of the differences between the Peak and True Peaks in each of these loud sections of music. The peaks can be seen at the top right in these extracts:
Logic’s Peak Mode Reading:
Logic’s True Peak Reading:
You can see that both Umbra’s Takeoff and Extreme Energy are over odBfs in their true peak, and are therefore prone to distortion, whereas Jeremy Soule’s Basilisk Battle is slightly over as well on the left side.
Youlean’s Loudness Meter V2 Free Edition
If you use a meter like Logic’s for measuring the frequency content and stereo width, there’s no issue. However, you have to STOP using it (or any other DAW’s loudness meter, for that matter) for the purpose of measuring the true peaks and distortion of your tracks. The truth is, your music is likely to have inter sample peaks that you are not aware of (peaks that your DAW will not show you).
If you import a master into your session and run a loudness meter like Youlean, you will see it is a bit less forgiving than the one from Logic (or meters from the majority of other DAWs)
Not only does Youlean give you a more accurate true peak value, it also tells you the dynamic range of your song in real time (if you play it from start to finish). In the following examples below, you can see how brutal and how quickly the distortion seems to build up in comparison to what Logic tells you about your levels. Check out the metering on “TRUE PEAK MAX (L R)” at the bottom left of these extracts:
Youlean’s True Peak Reading
As you can see, Extreme Energy and Takeoff have higher peaks shown on Youlean than in Logic. The Basilisk Boss Battle remains almost identical, except it shows distortion in both the left and right sides. Extreme Energy, however, went from 0.2 to 0.4, and Takeoff shows an equal 1.0 distortion (L and R both lit in red).
In the 2nd part of this post, I will analyse LEVELs and conclude the accuracy and effectiveness of the true peaks between these three metering plugins, as well as explain why these small details can be really important for when it comes to balancing and handling the dynamics of your music.
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