yes, but who cares. if you mix music properly you can not win the loudness war against people who design synthesizer sounds in order to get the most out of a certain LUFS and Peak by taking advantage of the weaknesses of the LUFS calculation.

if you are destroying your music yourself using a limiter you could as well leave that same process to youtube.

unless your LRA is not below the lowest standard of a platform*), just do not use a limiter.

use stuff only when required. mastering is not a creativity experiment.

*) youtube and some others do not even have a minimum at all.

 

Last edited: May 21, 2026 at 12:41 AM

It's a little difficult to explain without bringing other ten things into play here, the best way you can understand that is that the volume you add to the track reflects into your speakers/headphones as more volume, but if you turn your speakers down, the actual loudness of the file hasn't changed.

That's exactly what I've been saying since my first post. If you want to compete, you need to get as loud as possible without compromising the sound. There's no reason to target exactly -14 if you can cleanly go beyond that, unless you really want that dynamic range, and even that is genre-dependent. If you make a metal track at -14 exactly and put it on Spotify, you're going to be quieter than every other metal track, even though it's the same integrated LUFS at platform level.

In the end, you should just get the most of your tools without compromising the vision of the song. No one wants to hear an acoustic guitar crackling because someone pushed it too hard to achieve a -6 reading.