How can I distinguish between a dynamic music and a loud non-dynamic music?
Can you provide an example? ( I prefer metal or rock one that I understand more)

 

The classic engineers answer is the crest factor. That's the difference between the peaks in your music, and the average loudness of the music, typically some kind of RMS reading over time. The LUFS standards also include the average loudness of your track, from start to end.

Technical explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crest_factor

Human readable: https://www.prosoundweb.com/topics/studio/tech_tip_of_the_day_the_crest_factor_in_mastering1/

Play any of the Lord of The Rings/Hobbit films on your DAW from the original glass media, and note how vast the bass can sound, how huge the orchestra can be, and how delicate the female voices are. Then, without changing the volume knob, play any track you think is great. Protect your ears when you do.

 

The Metallica sounds awful They have limited guitars and drums to the death.
The Steely Dan sounds very natural, but IMHO it sounds quiter.

 

Do you know how can I detect it with an analyzer VST, beside my ear of course?

 

But surely that's the tradeoff between loudness and dynamics. If you're listening on crap equipment the louder stuff is more exciting because you can hear what's going on more consistently. Conversely the more dynamic stuff will sound much better on decent equipment because you can turn up the volume without unwanted artefacts.

 

I hate submitting my music to online streaming services, because they all alter the sound somehow. The compression and normalization they apply is destructive, as is downsampling the audio.

 

I think this one is great.
11 different analyzing tools (pull down menue upper left)

 

http://www.brainworx-music.de/en/plugins/bx_meter Brainworx bx_meter

Also quite useful is Nugen's MasterCheck/ Mastercheck Pro, which not only meters your loudness but has a loudness matching utility built in.

 

This one has 4 - 5dB LUFS less than Metallica's

 

Last edited: Jan 1, 2018

Pursuing louder and louder tracks to get benefit of that in comparison to music 'competitors' is nothing the less then destroying the music itself. Luckily the online stream music medias figured it out already and put the standards for a loudness.
I agree though that -14 LUFS is already very loud for any type of music. I really hate turning down the volume knob once in a while becosue someone has mixed some video audio up to -9 LUFS or around and it just want to kill me on playback.

It's true it will sound better but when actually you switch from track to track to compare? But it's doesn't mean it's better. Stealing makes you richer but does it mean it's a good way?

 

yes the loudness war is over.
what i mean by this is when I ( all of us nowadays)
are mixing and mastering a song, we make a final product or version which is much much less squashed and compresses and loud then we could.
we never come close to even half as loud as we can possibly make it with own modern tools.
I myself in 2017, can make a song 20db louder than what i do .
IF the loudness war WAS alive and still running, I (all of us) would be making mixes close to the limit of how loud we can possibly make a song,
we WOULDN"T be making songs 10db or 20db quieter than our capabilities allow for.
each year more tools are available, more knowledge is obtained by us and we can considerably increase our potential for maximum volume.
I can make a mix 25db louder than i feel like. i can make a mix that loud with zero limiters and zero compressors. if i wanted to add in limiters and comps i COULD make a mix -3db rms .
so even though our mixes still generally get louder over the years, they also get clearer.

in recent years we now have the ability to use harmonics like never before naturally shaping our audio in the same type of pleasing ways that old tubes and tape machine did, but we can use these in new ways to level out the volume of a track BUT still HEARING all the differences that existed by the original audios dynamics. this process of making the volume consistent allows for the music to sound the same on different speakers from cheap to high end.
we don't crave the literal dynamics.
we crave the differences in timbre that are produced harmonically when instruments are played at those different volume levels a drum hit soft and med and loud sounds different , we can level the volume while still hearing those sound differences, where our brain perceives that detail even though the literal volume stays the same.
picture a soft spoken vocal versus a medium vocal vs the loudest belted vocal ( by same singer)
what makes this powerful is the way that the voice changes its sound at those levels.
so even though a new 2017 track comes out with vocals "leveled" volume, we still hear all those differences in the harmonics that the performance had sung at those volumes levels, and the result is a audio track that will perform well on cheap ear buds or high end audiophile speakers.